


phantom limbs

by tatelangdon



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved, Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, basically they’re the only two people left on earth, they live in a bunker, zombie apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-06-27 11:08:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15684213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatelangdon/pseuds/tatelangdon
Summary: romance isn’t particularly at the forefront of shane madej’s thoughts during a zombie apocalypse. but when there’s only one human left on earth, your options for a lover become a little limited.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> im very uneasy about whether or not i want to continue this story, so im just going to beta test the first chapter!! please let me know if you guys are interested in this sort of thing and if i should keep writing haha. thank you! enjoy <3

With an undead bag of rotting flesh and decaying bones sitting on your chest, you really begin to rethink your decisions. 

 

Shane Madej makes a lot of stupid decisions. For example; sometimes he says “You too!” when waiters tell him to enjoy his meal, sometimes he will accidentally drop his wallet in a toilet and then have to fish it out, and sometimes he decides to travel to the most heavily infested zombie area to see if the gas station has any microwave burritos left.

 

“Yeah, this was quite the bad decision,” Shane says out loud, using his goofy voice. “Quite the pickle I’m in.” 

 

Shane isn’t necessarily a strong guy. Sure, he’s got height to his advantage, but when a rabid corpse is trying to sink its rotten teeth into your very-human throat, it becomes a bit difficult to use your height. His hands squelch with each squeeze; rancid, gooey blood slowly bubbling down his knuckles as he presses his fingertips tighter against the stripped away zombie neck. 

 

Out of all the stupid decisions that Shane Madej makes on an average basis, he thinks that this one may be the worst. 

 

“It really wasn’t worth dying over, big guy,” Shane tells the zombie, watching the way that the moldy eye dangles right out of the socket. This corpse in particular is missing a jaw, causing a writhing tongue to drip all kinds of fluids onto Shane’s face as it repeatedly lunges down in an attempt to take a bite. “Microwave burritos just isn’t a cool thing to put on a tombstone.” 

 

His heart thuds heavily in his chest, as if a basketball is being slammed against his ribs repeatedly. Shane has never truly been in danger before, he’s spent the last eight months sleeping in the back of a U-Haul truck parked outside a community college. He never had reason to leave that area, he got all his food from the college kitchens, sometimes raiding students’ dorms to find some true junk food. He got comfortable in the safety that surrounded him, the walk from the college to his moving truck was almost tranquil. Once you get past the fact that he’s the only person left in a post apocalyptic world, sure. It was peaceful. He’s never had a reason to defend himself, never had a reason to learn how to fight. 

 

Now, he’s pinned to the ground by a gross piece of shit, and he can’t stop making shitty sarcastic comments in an attempt to distract himself from the fact he is literally about to die. 

 

With a sudden swing, the zombie’s head is split in half. It cracks and caves in like a sinkhole, the skull fragments giving in beneath the swift blade of an axe coming down between its eyes. A splatter of sludge sprays Shane in the face, a warm, squishing sound protruding from the head cavity as the axe is pulled out from the stump. The corpse goes limp, dropping all of its weight onto Shane, causing his clothes to become damp with stench. 

 

Shane looks up to see who, or what, has come to his rescue, only to be met with the swing of the axe coming straight for him. Shane panics, rolling over on the linoleum tiles, clutching the dead corpse to his chest tightly. 

 

“Woah, woah, hey!” Shane bursts out, slowly scooting backwards down the aisle. He becomes frightened, freeing one hand to pick up the closest thing that can be used as a weapon. He throws bags of sour gummy worms at the legs of the attacker, his frantic voice claiming “Human! I’m a human!” 

 

“What?” The person responds in an incredulous tone. 

 

Shane looks up, squinting against the harsh fluorescent lights. Before him stands a somewhat tall, yet very built young man, a warm tan coating his skin, his clothes clean and tidy compared to Shane’s wrinkly flannel. The first thing that Shane notices is the man’s eyes. They’re unlike anything he’s seen before. His eyes are deep, resembling the terrifying unknown that Shane has been fascinated by his whole life. He sees the bottom of the ocean in those eyes, and each time he blinks, those long eyelashes cause a tidal wave to hit the shores on his flushed cheeks. He looks just as surprised as Shane does, but it’s easy to understand why. 

 

Neither of them have seen another human in seven months. Mostly everyone died out within the first month of the outbreak, and after that first bloodbath, humanity became limited to just themselves. That is, until now. 

 

“Holy shit, dude,” Shane breathes out, dropping the bag of peach rings in his hand. A small pile of assorted gummy candies now lie at the feet of the axe-wielding maniac, making his sudden appearance a bit less intimidating. “You’re, like, human!” 

 

“You’re cuddling a fucking corpse,” the man responds, his arms still held up with the axe, ready to swing at any second. 

 

Shane looks down, realizing he is in fact still clutching onto the meat shield he was using to protect himself against the rift that this man was trying to open within Shane’s cranium. He frowns, his cheeks feeling hot with embarrassment as he shoves the corpse away and wipes some of the black sludge coating his hands off onto his pants. 

 

“You came at me with a fucking  _ axe _ ,” Shane defends himself, shakily standing to his feet. As he stands, he realizes quickly that this guy is short. But then again, everyone is short in comparison to Shane. “What were you trying to do, kill me?”

 

“I-“ the little one opens his mouth to debate his innocence, but he quickly shuts it again, a thin line forming across his lips. 

 

“Where the hell did you even get that thing? It looks sick as hell,” Shane reaches out to touch the handle of the rusty weapon, only for it to be yanked away as the man takes a step back. 

 

“I’m sorry, just- Who are you? Where did you come from?” He asks, his voice skeptical and eyes even more doubtful. 

 

“Oh! I’m Shane,” Shane nods, kicking a bit of brain matter off of his shoe. “Bleh. I stay out on the west side of town. Really quiet that ways.”

 

“Quiet?” The man looks confused, his eyes fixated on the floor. Shane notices his posture; unsure, reserved, and certainly guarded. 

 

“Yeah, man. Super relaxed,” Shane explains. “Practically a ghost town over there. You should really consider moving that way!”

 

“I’m not moving,” the man shakes his head. “You’re out of your mind, man.” 

 

“Says the one who just swung an axe at my head,” Shane defends himself, putting his hands up to surrender. 

 

The man looks down and gestures towards the dead corpse on the floor. “Could you blame me?” 

 

Shane shrugs, then tucks his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t catch your name.” 

 

The little man turns and begins to walk down the gas station aisle, his boots squeaking against the tile as he walks. Shane dumbly follows him, taking this moment to truly observe the man’s attire. 

 

He looks like a cliche. He’s wearing big, black combat boots, presumably steel toed by the way they round up at the top. Paired with that is a set of olive green cargo pants, mud smeared on the seat of the jeans. Tucked into the tight belt is a black shirt, crisp but a little dusty. It conforms to his body well, showing that he clearly takes care in his muscles. Shane hasn’t worked out in months, why should he? It’s not like he had anybody else to impress for awhile. 

 

“Because I didn’t tell you,” the broody man says. He looks over his shoulder at Shane, those eyes shining bright for one dull moment. Then, they’re hardened again, and he returns his attention to what’s in front of him. 

 

“Alright, Mr. Mysterious,” Shane laughs, leaning up against the counter as the man drags a duffel bag across the floor. From where he’s standing, Shane can see various bottles of aspirin and a nearly lethal amount of cough drops already stored inside. Now, the man is busy dropping 5 hour energy shots into the bag in groups of four. “That’s a lot of hours of energy.”

 

The man looks up, but he remains silent. After clearing the counter of all of the energy drinks, he heads down the far east side of the store. Shane remains at the counter, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the stranger at all. Something about him is… captivating. That seems to be the right word, yeah. 

 

“What’cha restocking for?” Shane asks, his voice carrying across the empty convenience store quite well. 

 

A look of annoyance flashes briefly across the shorter one’s face. Then, he drops the tension in his shoulders, and exhales a response. “My bunker. I’m on a supply run, I’m trying to stock back up on non-food items. 

 

“Bunker?” Shane repeats, the hint of a smirk permanently embedded into his voice. “Ah, jeez. You one of those crazy conspiracy nuts?”

 

The little man’s blackened eyes shoot up in fury. He clearly took offense to Shane’s remark, and it’s made clear by his snippy attitude. “Take a look around, genius! This isn’t a fucking conspiracy, this is  _ real life.  _ Have you fucking noticed that we’re in the midst of a zombie fucking apocalypse?”

 

Shane puts his hands up once more.  _ The little man’s cute when he’s angry _ . 

 

“Okay, okay, sorry,” Mr. Mysterious quickly apologizes, “I haven’t talked to a real person in… God, I don’t even remember when the last time was.” 

 

Shane opens his mouth to respond, a witty remark on the tip of his tongue, but he’s cut short once he notices the look of alarm come across the ethnically ambiguous features adorning the other’s face. 

 

“Do you hear that?” Mr. Mysterious whispers, his body going still and rigid. 

 

“Hear what?” Shane asks stupidly, cupping his hand around his ear. 

 

“ _ Shhh _ ,” the man stands silently, his eyes slowly traveling across the store to the main entrance that Shane’s next to. Without causing too much alarm, he swallows hard, and quietly says “Hey. Come here. Come over here, quietly.” 

 

“Huh?” Shane straightens up, his face scrunched up. 

 

“Just come here,” the man’s eyes flicker from Shane to the door behind him. 

 

Shane catches this nanofraction of a second, and without hesitation, he turns around to look out the door. 

 

Another corpse rears its hand backwards, rotting flesh dripping off the aching bones like boiled chicken. As soon as it makes eye contact with Shane, its fist collides with the glass to make a loud bang. 

 

“Oh, fuck, man!” Shane backs up quickly, his heart racing once again. Another zombie? Another one? He nearly just got killed, doesn’t he get to catch a break? 

 

“Come on, come here!” The man shouts at him, but Shane is frozen to his spot in fear. 

 

The thing about zombie movies that they got wrong was the fact that they’re all portrayed as braindead idiots. Which is half true, they are braindead. However, they are all far from idiots. Most zombies seem to have cognitive memories, ones that make them understand that a door handle can be pulled on to open up the barrier between it and a 6’5” dinner. 

 

Shane watches the broken hand slowly wrap around the handle, the worn out “Welcome!” stickers peeling from the glass door. The zombie pulls a bit, the shaking forearm pulsing with maggots. Shane feels his stomach tighten and begin to digest itself, his own heart threatening to stop right here before the zombie can even get anywhere near him. 

 

As the bell above the gas station door chimes, Shane feels a strong hand grip onto his wrist tightly. This seems to snap him out of his trance, the physical contact scaring him far more than the bones and flesh slithering in through the door. 

 

The hand isn’t rotting, though. It’s human. A very warm, human hand, tugging on Shane’s unreasonably long limb in an attempt to get him away from the approaching corpse. 

 

The man picks up the duffel bag as they move, swinging it backwards to collide heavily with Shane’s chest. The axe remains propped against the wall, which the small boy takes with the hand not holding onto Shane. The two take off into a sprint, being cornered to the back of the store. 

 

“Fire exit, go,” the man pushes Shane forward, spinning around to protect the ignorant one’s back from getting mauled to death by the fast paced zombie. 

 

Shane pushes the door open, sounding the alarm and setting off the sprinklers inside. The heavy entrance swings outwards, revealing a thick line of corpses crawling or jogging in the direction of the blaring alarms. 

 

“Uhh,” Shane raises his voice out of concern, backing up slowly and letting go of the door. His shoulder blades meet with the warm body behind him, the heat being the only indication that it’s the mysterious man and not another corpse. 

 

“What are you doing? Fucking  _ go! _ ” The man’s voice raises in pitch when he’s angry. Or maybe he’s afraid. Maybe he’s just as scared as Shane is. 

 

“There’s, like, a whole gang outside,” Shane turns around, his lips nervously twitching as he struggles over words and anxiously fumbles with the zipper of the duffle bag in his arms. 

 

The man looks annoyed, water streaming down in sparkling tiny rivers onto the two of them. He looks up with deadpan eyes, his voice saying “Seriously, dude?”

 

Without hesitation, the man turns around and swings his axe at the throat of the zombie running towards them. He makes a good shot, the blade barging in halfway deep. The sound alone is horrendous, something that sounds similar to squeezing rotten peaches. The little one pulls the hatchet out once more, the corpse dropping down to the ground with a heavy thud. For safe measure, he slices a clean line down the center of the face, all the remaining features caving in to create a grave for each and every one of its decaying teeth. 

 

“Come on,” the man orders, stepping over the corpse quickly. The floor is slick with sprinkler water and flowing blood, making Shane’s shoes squeak as he tumbles over long legs and dead body parts to catch up. 

 

The man leads them behind the cash register, ignoring the corpse banging on the windows and groaning out several slurred profanities. The mysterious man jiggles the door handle to the back office, mumbling under his breath, before he grows frustrated and slams his shoulder into the wood. Shane hears the wooden door frame crack, and he watches in complete awe as the smaller guy slams up against the door one more time, busting the lock out and opening up the new room. 

 

He doesn’t stop to gloat, though. The man merely approaches the window, swinging the axe back behind him, and using the end of the handle to punch a hole through the glass. It shatters effortlessly, like little diamonds falling down to the wet tiles below. The man uses his arm to clear out any of the remaining shards around the frame, before turning around to face the clueless Shane Madej still hopelessly clinging onto the duffel bag. 

 

“Come on, you first,” the man waves him over. Shane isn’t one to question authority in near death situations, so he nods, tossing the duffel bag out the window and hauling one of his long legs up through the frame. 

 

Just as he’s contorting his body to fit through, the sounds of footsteps can be heard rapidly approaching the office the two are escaping from. The sirens blare, only causing the corpses to grow more aggravated than usual. Shane hurries, dropping to the ground on the other side before turning around to help the man. 

 

The man ignores Shane’s outstretched arms, instead doing his best to shove the messy desk towards the door, his arms flexing immensely as he exerts so much strength. Then, he grabs onto the top of the window frame, lifting his lower half up in order to swing through the window. 

 

Once his feet hit the ground, he picks up the duffle bag and bursts into a run. His legs may be short, but he sure does have speed. Shane doesn’t have a problem keeping up with him, but that doesn’t change the fact that Shane is still out of shape despite the long legs allowing him to stretch farther. They run through the parking lot, tearing up gravel beneath their feet as they go. Shane doesn’t have any idea where they’re going, but he’s pretty sure in this moment that he would follow this little axe wielding dude anywhere. 

 

Wait. 

 

Where’s the axe. 

 

“Dude, where’s your axe?” Shane wheezes out, his lungs threatening to collapse as they now reach the main road, the smooth pavement allowing for easier steps. 

 

The man looks down at his hands, genuinely surprised that his weapon isn’t there. However, upon looking for his beloved tool, Shane takes notice of all the blood trickling from the man’s skin. It’s really no surprise, he cleared out all that glass with just his bare arm, then proceeded to grab the jagged shards lining the sill during his escape. 

 

“You hurt yourself,” Shane pants, pointing out the obvious. 

 

The mysterious man doesn’t respond, merely wipes his bleeding arm on his shirt, and surges forward with a bit more energy. 

 

They run for what feels like forever. Shane begins to slow after they’re out of city limits, to which the man matches pace, but neither of them stop running. Shane can taste battery acid in his mouth, and his spleen feels as if it will collapse if he takes one more step, but he’s not going to stop. If the mysterious man is running, then so is Shane. 

 

It must be summer. Shane stopped keeping tracks of the days and months, but he knows now that it must be mid July. There’s no other way to explain the abhorred temperatures his body is melting under. They’re out in the desert now, nothing but dirt and sand and road. The sun is orange, hanging low along the horizon as if it’s threatening to pierce through the fabric of the sky and drop below the skyline at any second now. The heat waves are visible in front of them, wavy and humid, causing Shane to breathe in hard puffs of air and flying sand. 

 

Just when he thinks that he’s going to die out here, the mysterious man comes to an abrupt stop. Shane’s legs falter, wobbling as if they’ll give out beneath him, but ready for a well deserved break. 

 

“What’s up?” Shane asks, panting heavily. He holds a hand over his chest, sweat dripping from every surface of his skin. He tries to read the man’s expression, but the man is just staring at Shane, weirdly enough. Not even necessarily making eye contact, just kind of… looking everywhere. 

 

He snaps out of it momentarily. He shakes his head, looking away, pointing off into the distance. “We’re here.” 

 

“Here?” Shane looks around. “Where’s here? There’s literally nothing around here.” 

 

“Exactly,” the mysterious man slings the duffle bag over his shoulder, setting out into the dirt and sand towards whatever nonsense it was that he pointed at. “Nobody’s going to find me out here, now will they?” 

 

Shane follows cluelessly. His legs groan, but he’s grateful for the change of pace nonetheless. “I’m telling you, man. Heading out west is the way to go! It was practically a sanctuary over on that side of town.”  

 

The man cracks the slightest hint of a smile, glancing up at Shane out of the corner of his eye. It’s a sly, sneaky look, but it’s still one that Shane catches because of his blatant staring. The sun sets golden hues on the man’s tan face, making all the anger and stress go away. Both of them are still soaked from the sprinklers, making the man’s jet black hair lay slick against his forehead. He looks cute like this, he looks unaware of the world around them. Shane thinks that maybe if a zombie apocalypse hadn’t broken out, this man would be almost attractive. The anxiety of an apocalypse certainly does take a toll on one’s appearance, however. He can only imagine what he himself looks like. 

 

There, in the middle of the desert, is a single cactus. This cactus is fake, it’s potted. There’s a plastic pink flower glued to the side of it. But this isn’t the surprising part, no, what Shane’s attention is really consumed with is the manmade dirt stairs leading down into what looks like an entrance to hell. Still, even then, the mysterious man begins descending the steps without a second thought. So Shane follows. Naturally. 

 

“Oh, is this your bunker?” Shane asks gleefully, entering the dimly lit chamber. 

 

The man begins to unlock the second door, a series of pulleys and one keypad that he covers with his hand when he enters the password. Once the second door is opened, he finally looks back and acknowledges Shane’s remark. 

 

“No, dipshit. This is just the grave that I’m leading us straight towards.”

 

Shane puts his hands up, eyebrows raised. “Calm down, little man. I’m a curious guy, I can’t help my child-like nature.” 

 

“Yeah, child-like,” the man repeats with a scoff. “I’m only letting you stay here for the night. Once dawn breaks, it’s your job to head back west to your safe side of town.” 

 

“Alright, sounds fair to me,” Shane nods, standing beside the man in the entrance of the building. Everything before him is pitch black, so dark that Shane can’t even see his own hand in front of his face. 

 

The man reaches over, slapping his hand against what sounds like a switch. Following that is a series of several smaller switches being flipped, and the bunker they’re standing in slowly comes to life. The lighting isn’t bright, but more natural than anything. There’s scenery paintings all along the metal walls, and vanity light bulbs lining those paintings as if to create the illusion that they’re windows. It’s subtle light fixtures, but it brings a luminance to the living space that makes it feel more like a home and less like a bunker. 

 

“Wow,” Shane looks at the large bookshelves filled with endless amounts of literature, spotlights shining down on the spines of each novel. There’s two couches set perpendicular, with recliners parallel to each respective couch. End tables hold lamps and various light reading on each surface, with a coffee table centered right in the middle of the furniture square. There’s a hallway to the left of the living room, but it fades off to black so Shane can’t see much other than the end of the rug sticking out on the hardwood flooring. “This is impressive. What’s with all the couches? You got roommates, buddy?” 

 

“What?” The man turns to ask, the warm ambient lighting slowly glowing along the edges of his facial structure like a stream trickling through the forest. Woodland creatures would flock to that stream, they’d nestle in and find safety in the bend of this man’s cheekbones. “No. It’s just me.” 

 

He ventures into the living area, dropping the duffle bag down on one of the couches with a sigh. Shane watches him carefully, inspecting the way that the man moves about the room carefully, leaving his boots next to a coat rack fully loaded with camo print jackets. The man shakes his head, rubbing his eyes. He looks as exhausted as Shane feels, yet he doesn’t drop his cautious guard. 

 

Shane looks at the two recliners. One is well lived in, with creases and fading on the leather interior. The second recliner is pristine. Looks practically brand new. 

 

_ Did he lose someone _ ? Shane wonders. As obnoxious as Shane Madej can be, he has enough common sense to know that he just shouldn’t press some subjects. This seems to be one of them; everyone lost someone important during the outbreak. It’s safe to assume that this bunker was built for two. 

 

“Do you want to shower first?” The man asks, stopping at the hall entrance. His hand fumbles against the wall until it hits a light switch, a row of LED lights framing the ceiling suddenly waking up like a Christmas tree on December first. “You got a lot of blood on you.” 

 

Shane looks down at the front of his shirt, spotting the dried black goop that oozed from the zombie’s throat, paired nicely with the blood splatters that came from the man’s axe. He suddenly becomes painfully aware of that same blood still sprayed on his face, so he nods to the shorter one, taking a step into the bunker. 

 

The little man shows him where the bathroom is, leaving him alone while he goes to fetch a towel. Shane is quiet, suddenly losing some of his cocky edge now that he’s in someone else’s home. Sure, he may be an arrogant jokester, but he was still raised with manners. If someone takes you in and welcomes you into their home, you treat them with respect. No zombie apocalypse will ever change the integral basis of Shane’s upbringing. 

 

Shane stares at himself in the mirror, something he really hasn’t seen in months. His scruff is coming in patchy because of the way he shaves by touch, his hair choppily laying down against his forehead, still damp from the sprinklers they got caught in. The surprising part however is all the blood. There’s so much of it. Shane’s face is painted like a ruby, making his stomach feel queasy at the mere sight of it. 

 

“Knock knock,” the soft voice announces itself outside the bathroom door. When Shane doesn’t respond right away, the door cracks open and a hand slides through holding a towel. “I got some clothes for you, too.”

 

Shane reaches over and opens the bathroom door, greeting the first person he’s seen in months. His chest aches with nostalgia, missing a time when humans were everywhere. When he was friends with them. When he had friends. Shane looks at this little one nervously fidgeting in the doorway, and he thinks… maybe. Just maybe. 

 

“Thank you,” Shane says, taking the folded clothes out of the man’s hands. “I’ve been living in this flannel for a week.” 

 

“Yeah, I can tell,” the man cracks a smile for the first time in the hours that they’ve known each other. He nervously looks to the side, then gives Shane a challenging stare. “I could smell you from a mile away.”

 

“Wow, zing!” Shane laughs, something that’s always come natural to him. No matter how dark his world gets, he can always find a way to crack a joke. No matter what. 

 

“Anyways. Those are the biggest clothes I have, but they’re not giant sized, so,” the teasing continues. Shane can’t help but notice just how wonderful a smile looks on this guy. 

 

“I’ll try not to rip ‘em with my big muscles,” Shane lifts one of his weak, bony arms, flexing nothing but noodle. The man just shakes his head and looks down at the floor, silently exiting the bathroom and closing the door behind him. 

 

Steam fills the bathroom quickly when there’s no exhaust fan for it to fill out of. Shane stands under the shower head, slightly crouched to make sure his hair gets wet, and he watches as the water runs black and brown. Flecks of dirt wash off of him, swirling around at the pool surrounding his feet. Shane feels the cleansing rebirthing him, his lungs filled with humid air. His muscles burn from the running, so when Shane can no longer stand to lean against the shower wall, he lets himself slide down to sit against the basin. 

 

_ What am I doing? _ He wonders to himself.  _ Why am I in some random bunker? _

 

Shane’s always overthought the small details. He’s always been an anxious guy. In school, his girlfriends used to poke fun at him for being the emotional, needy one in the relationship, but he can’t help it. This is just how he was wired. Now, he’s across town in some random guy’s underground bunker, away from all the safety that he previously knew, and he is letting his mind wander. 

 

_ Fuck, I don’t even know this guy’s  _ _ name _ _. _

 

Shane stays in the shower until he’s calmed down, finally getting out once the water turns his skin into wrinkly raisins. The steam stays trapped in the small room, creating an illusion that makes Shane think he’s got his head in the clouds. He reaches out, wiping some of the condensation off the mirror in order to see his reflection. Without all the blood and dirt, he almost doesn’t recognize himself.  

 

Shane finds the living room empty when he emerges from the bathroom. The air feels crisp and refreshing after escaping the humid bathroom of doom, which only makes Shane wonder how the man hasn’t suffocated underground for these past couple of months. There must be some oxygen tank pumping throughout the bunker, but as his eyes scan along the ceilings and floor panels for any sort of vents, he only comes up empty handed. 

 

Shane knows it’s rude to explore, but he can’t help but wonder. He didn’t see it before because his back was turned to it, but on the other side of the living room, there appears to be a built in breakfast bar separating the dining room from the lounging area. Shane spins one of the stools as he passes, taking notice of two on each side. Again, another clue that this bunker was built for more than one person. He stays quiet though, softly padding around the minimalist dining room to the hall branching off into another room. 

 

“Oh, hey,” Shane announces his presence as soon as he enters the kitchen. The man is standing in front of a cabinet, unloading some of the supplies from his duffel bag up onto neat little shelves. 

 

He jumps when he hears Shane, his hands dropping the bag as he goes to clutch at his chest. “Jesus Christ! The fuck are you doing just sneaking up on people like that? Where were those quiet feet when we were fucking running for our lives?!” 

 

Shane cracks a grin, shrugging his shoulders loosely. “Sorry, bud. Didn’t mean to spook ya. Didn’t think it’d be so easy!” 

 

“Yeah, well, I’m not exactly used to having company,” The man responds, picking up his spilled items. Shane takes notice of what they are, counting six boxes of Dramamine, an assortment of ibuprofen, and an ungodly amount of protein bars. “How was the shower? Do you feel better?”

 

Something about that sentence feels warm and inviting. It’s nothing like the man’s usual brash, defensiveness. He sounds genuinely interested, which only deepens Shane’s curiosity about him. He sounds as if he’s used to being a caretaker. As if he has been looking after someone his whole life. That type of attitude is the solidarity of an older brother, it’s clearly written all over his body language. Shane is the youngest of all the Madejs, he’s been looked out for and babied almost his whole life. Up until the outbreak, really. Then, he had to take care of himself. 

 

“Water pressure was superb!” Shane pushes all these thoughts aside, making yet another joke. It’s a fucking zombie apocalypse, everyone’s depressed. Shane’s just doing what he can to lighten the mood everywhere he goes, even if his only audience for the past eight months has just been himself. “Like a nice little spa day. I’d give it a five star review on Yelp.” 

 

The man smiles, something Shane can barely see since his back is facing him. But still, from the three quarters view, Shane watches the corner of the man’s mouth lift up just a little bit. 

 

“That’s good. Too bad the clothes don’t fit that well,” he remarks, glancing over his shoulder at Shane’s attire. 

 

The outfit itself is fine, it’s like any other leisure clothes. An old t-shirt featuring a faded out, vintage Coca Cola logo, and a grey pair of cotton sweatpants, cinched at the ankles. On any normal person, this would look comfortable. But on Shane “Bigfoot” Madej, this has turned into quite the provocative look. The shirt fits like a crop top on him, barely drifting past his waist, exposing the pale strip of his abdomen before his hipbones curve down into the waistband of the sweatpants. Shane Madej is a tall lad, he’s been made fun of his whole life. (How’s the weather up there?) (You play basketball? No? You should!) (Make sure you don’t hit your head on the ceiling!) With that being said, the sweatpants stop at his calves, leaving his ankles bare and exposed like some old timey Victorian whore. 

 

“Ah, yeah,” Shane chuckles, shrugging once again. “I don’t mind. They’re not covered in blood, so that’s a plus.” 

 

Another smile. 

 

Each one feels like an achievement. 

 

“Alright, well, I’m gonna go take a shower now,” The man turns on his heel, making brief eye contact with Shane before lowering his gaze to the floor. “Uh, help yourself to anything, I suppose. I don’t know. I wasn’t really expecting anybody, sorry.” 

 

“Okay,” Shane nods, biting back a witty comment. He knows when to stop, and the look of discomfort in regards to having Shane in the man’s private bunker tells him that he really shouldn’t be making jokes. 

 

The man slips past Shane in the doorway, leaving him alone in the kitchen. A thought crosses Shane’s mind, one that makes him audibly curse under his breath. After nearly losing his life, sacrificing so much, and following some random stranger home, he  _ still  _ didn’t get what he wanted. He went through all the trouble of crossing town, yet he still ended up empty handed. 

 

“Good job, Madej,” Shane mumbles to himself, venturing further into the kitchen. He opens the freezer on the rare chance of this man having exactly what Shane’s craving, but it’s no surprise to see mostly TV dinners and frozen meats. There is a box of ice cream sandwiches, though, which Shane makes a note of for later. “Went through all that trouble of getting spat on by some cold-blood just for you to end up underground with some axe-wielding maniac, completely burrito-less.” 

 

He scavenges through the kitchen, mostly just curious to see what the man actually has. He’s quite impressed with how fully equipped this place is, not to mention just how nice it is. Besides having no windows, Shane could easily mistake this as one of the nicer apartments that he used to see on the covers of magazines long before the outbreak spread. 

 

Shane has so many questions, but the most prominent one that seems to be rattling around in his mind is;  _ When did you build this place _ ? It’s clear in the architecture that this bunker is not new, but it’s not falling apart, either. The man is stocked, he’s prepared. He must have had this place long before the outbreak, it’s as if he’s just been waiting for something terrible to happen all his life. 

 

After picking at some of the fruit sitting on the counter, Shane returns to the living room to investigate the bookshelves. Most of the books are on cults, serial killers, and the paranormal. 

 

_ Great. He’s gonna fucking chop me up and eat me.  _

 

Out of pure boredom, Shane picks one of the autobiographies off the shelf, nestling into the plush couch to start his reading. From where he’s sitting, he can hear the shower running, but nothing else. No matter how long he’s been living alone, no matter how long the world has been under, no matters what, he’s never going to hate the silence. He won’t stop missing the busy sounds of LA, or even his hometown outside of Chicago. He’ll always crave to hear the chaotic sounds of abrasive traffic, the trains whistling off in the distance, the bass-boosted parties that never  seem to end. He misses the city being alive, but he thinks he mostly misses humanity. 

 

The shower turns off, catching Shane’s sensitive hearing instantly. He lifts his head, his eyes on the hallway, but instead he only hears footsteps tread down the opposite end of the hall. He lets out a dejected sigh, returning to the book on his lap. 

 

He misses humanity. 

 

“It’s Ryan, by the way.”

 

Shane startles, his body lurching forward as a natural instinct to hearing the noise from behind him. Where were these reflexes when a corpse attacked him from behind and managed to get him down on the floor?

 

Shane swivels around on the couch, looking up at the man standing a few feet away. He’s now dressed in just a black shirt and gym shorts, but he’s got a pair of glasses on the bridge of his nose that really compliment the symmetry of his face. He’s holding a stack of folded bedding, his fingers nervously fidgeting with the threading on a blanket. He looks sheepish, nervously stealing glances at Shane but otherwise looking around everywhere else. 

 

“Jesus, and you say  _ I  _ sneak up on people?” Shane gasps, catching his breath. He frowns just slightly, saying “What are you going on about, you fucking weirdo?”

 

So much for manners. 

 

“Ryan,” The man repeats. “My name’s Ryan. I didn’t tell you earlier because I didn’t trust you.” 

 

Shane pauses for a moment, his muscles relaxing as he slips back into his safe mode. This guy doesn’t act like a murderous psychopath, so maybe Shane’s suspicions are just paranoid thinking. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. 

 

After a brief second of hesitation, Shane quietly asks “So does that mean now you do?” 

 

“No, it’s just-“ the man, Ryan, looks off to the side. If Shane didn’t know any better, he’d think he saw a bit of pink flushing through Ryan’s tan cheeks. Probably just a trick of the light, though. “Um. You can sleep out here for the night. I wake up at dawn, I’d head out before noon if I were you. That’s when it’s safest.” 

 

Right. Shane has a home to return to. Not much of one, but still a home nonetheless. It’s nothing compared to this fucking underground oasis, but Ryan only allowed Shane the safety and immunity of his shelter for one night. 

 

“Right,” Shane nods. “I’ll get outta your hair tomorrow morning, sure.” 

 

Ryan makes a bit of an unreadable face, one that looks borderline uncomfortable. Still, even then, he steps forward to rest the blankets on the arm of the couch. He backs up to give Shane space, rubbing the back of his neck almost nervously. He seems nothing like the confident, determined guy who swung an axe at him without hesitation. No, now he’s demure, innocuous, and almost… scared? It must be the fact that a stranger is in his safe zone. Shane feels guilt start to build within him. 

 

“By the way, I, uh, took it upon myself to throw your clothes in the washer,” Ryan says. “I hope that’s okay. I’ll flip the load over to the dryer before I go to bed, so you have something clean for the morning.” 

 

“Oh,” Shane raises his eyebrows. “Thank you. I didn’t know you have a laundromat hidden in here somewhere. Do I need to give you some quarters as payment?” 

 

Ryan breathes out an airy laugh, but still takes a cautious step backwards. “Yeah, haha. Funny. Anyway, I, uh… I’ll leave you to it then.” 

 

Shane nods, swallowing awkwardly as the tension in the room thickens. He feels as if he’s going to die from just how uncomfortable he is, suddenly regretting every single thought he had about humanity before. He doesn’t miss this, he doesn’t miss the anxiety that came with new people, he didn’t miss the uncomfortable silences, and he certainly didn’t miss the uncertainty of whether or not he’s ever truly safe. Corpses are easy; at least you  _ know  _ they’re going to kill you. With humans, it’s a little different. They’re sporadic, they’re unpredictable. Shane could wake up with all his guts spilling onto the floor tomorrow morning. You just never really know. 

 

Judging by Ryan’s crossed arms, his muscles tightly flexed beneath the skin showing that his body is clenched, Shane assumes he must be thinking the same thing. 

 

“Thanks, by the way,” Shane blurts out, desperate to make the awkwardness go away. He closes the book and starts unfolding the blankets with caution. 

 

“Sure,” Ryan nods, “Not a problem, man. I have a ton of spare blank-“

 

“No, no, I mean… Thanks for earlier. In the gas station. You kinda saved my life,” Shane clarifies, and then furrows his eyebrows. “More than once.” 

 

“Oh,” Ryan looks surprised. “Yeah, man. I honestly just thought you were a corpse getting mauled by another dead fucker. I’m sure you can imagine how surprised I was when you started  _ talking. _ ”

 

Shane laughs at this, an easy chuckle that eliminates some of the strain in the atmosphere. “Imagine how I felt! Some guy was swinging an axe at my  _ face _ !”

 

“Sorry about that,” Ryan smiles, rubbing his biceps up and down slowly. “Good thing I missed, right?”

 

“Yeah, no shit,” Shane scoffs, looking up to meet Ryan’s eyes. 

 

There’s a moment where the two are looking at each other where they both have the same thought. The same feeling. The same urge. The same want. 

 

_ Please don’t go away.  _

 

Neither of the two say it, and neither of the two think that the other is sharing that feeling, so they both turn and feel the pressure grow higher. 

 

“Well,” Shane breaks the silence. 

 

“Goodnight, Shane,” Ryan says quickly, backing up at a rapid pace. 

 

“Yeah, goodnight, Ryan.” 

 

Ryan hits the lights on his way down the hall, drenching Shane in a completely blackened void. With no sounds of the city around him to comfort him, he can only become painfully aware of just how rapid his heart rate is climbing. 

 

An unsteady kick drum. Ryan Bergara just started the very beginnings of a symphony within Shane Madej that the tall one has never heard before. The needle in his mind hits the record, and the starts of a new soundtrack begin to write themselves as he lies down and wonders what he’s gotten himself into. 

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Dawn comes mysteriously. 

 

Almost like a fog rolling in from the west, creeping over the hills, crawling on the ground until it’s completely surrounded your ankles. Dawn comes quickly and silently, a stealthy assassin, ready to kill. Without a window to announce the sun’s arrival, Shane has no idea when dawn breaks. 

 

That is, until there’s a hand wrapped around his ankle, shaking the limb very loosely. 

 

“Hey, hey, hey, hey!” Shane Madej is awake in an instant, crawling backwards on the couch until he’s practically launched himself over the back of it. “Christ, what the fuck?” 

 

Ryan Bergara is standing in the living room, his arm still outstretched from where he was shaking Shane. He blinks vacantly, not acknowledging Shane’s panic at all. 

 

“It’s dawn,” Ryan states. “If you want to make it across town safely, I’d advise that you get a move on.” 

 

Shane slouches down on the couch, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his eyes. Never in his life has he woken up at dawn. What the fuck even is dawn? Exhaustion hangs over him like a dreary cloud, making him only dread the trek back to his home. 

 

“Right,” Shane says, “Yeah. Alright. Okay! I’ll go.” 

 

The two pause for a moment, tension rising between them uncomfortably. Neither of the two will say it, but they’re not exactly eager to part ways with the only other living being left. 

 

So, Ryan breaks the silence first. With a little bit too much hope in his words, he asks “Do you want to stay for breakfast?” 

 

“Oh, thank god,” Shane exhales in relief. “I mean, yeah. Yeah, I’d love to.” 

 

“Okay,” Ryan says, then looks around the room a little bit. The awkward tension doesn’t really move, just grows in size until it’s threatening to take up the entire bunker. Ryan knows he should say something else, but he doesn’t know what. Does he just walk away now? Does he invite Shane to follow him to the kitchen? God, he truly has forgotten how to socialize with other humans. 

 

Shane takes this moment of weird silence to notice that the lighting has changed. It’s a soft blue, framing the paintings with a wonderful 5 am washed out hue. Ryan must have the lighting system rigged to simulate daytime, because he feels like he’s just woken up for high school on a winter’s day. Dark, grey, muted. The sun wouldn’t rise until he was sitting in his homeroom class, and even then, it didn’t really rise. The sky just got brighter, but the sun was hidden behind clouds. Winter skies remain monochromatic. He glances down at Ryan’s arms, noticing that there’s gauze and bandages now wrapped around the places he injured yesterday. Upon noticing that Shane is staring, he moves his arms behind his back. 

 

“What time is it?” Shane then asks, looking up at the man still uncomfortably standing there. 

 

“Nearing six,” Ryan says quietly. 

 

“That is quite literally the worst thing you have said to me,” Shane remarks. He rubs his eyes again, but then realizes just how full his bladder is. Trying to keep things cheery, he says “Pee time! This boy’s gotta pee. It’s pee time.” 

 

Ryan makes a face at him, taking a step away from the couch. Some of the weirdness starts to dissipate, but that’s mostly Shane’s strange charm taking over. He’s been told he’s a weird guy almost all his life, but that doesn’t make his sense of humor any less endearing. Shane’s got charisma, and Ryan definitely takes notice of it. 

 

“Well, alright. You know where the bathroom is,” he steps aside, allowing Shane to pass through. Ryan heads the opposite direction, approaching the kitchen as if he’s on a mission, while Shane glances over his shoulder to watch the little guy go. 

 

When Shane enters the bathroom, he’s a little thrown off by the hospitality. He could sense that Ryan’s a bit of a caretaker, but he didn’t think it would go this far. Shane’s clothes are neatly folded on the counter, perched next to a plastic cup holding various things inside of it. There’s a sticky note pasted above the mirror that says “For the big guy” with a precise arrow drawn beneath it. 

 

“Oh, I guess that’s me,” Shane mumbles, a smile taking over his face. He pushes his clothes aside to take interest in the cup, carefully emptying it to examine the contents. Ryan’s gifted him a toothbrush, a travel size container of toothpaste, sample packet of shaving cream, a cheap razor, and a small miniature stick of deodorant. It’s a simple, but efficient little morning kit, and he’s not quite sure why Ryan would go to such lengths for old Shane Madej. 

 

Still, even so, he takes a leak and makes use of everything that was left for him. He’s glad to have a sharp razor, but he’s mostly excited about the mirror. He’s been shaving by touch for the last eight months and it certainly shows in his patchy stubble. 

 

He tries not to take too long. He knows Ryan wants him out of here pretty quickly, so he cleans his face up with his (now fresh) flannel, already dirtying it before it has a chance to grace his body. He stumbles out of the bathroom hurriedly, his mind creating enemy boss music as he imagines a countdown ticking away towards his inevitable doom. 

 

Ryan is waiting at the breakfast bar when Shane comes down the hall. There’s two plates resting on the surface, but neither of them have been touched. Ryan’s hands are folded patiently over his forearms, and his posture perks up just the slightest when Shane emerges. Was he waiting for Shane? 

 

“Took advantage of the razor, I see,” Ryan remarks, a more comfortable smile making its way across his face. 

 

“Oh, yes,” Shane rubs his clean shaven face. “I was afraid I was starting to look a bit like a yeti.” 

 

“Shaving won’t help you there, you’re still about eight feet tall,” Ryan quips, causing Shane to burst into a chuckle as he approaches the barstool. He examines what’s on the two plates, noticing that there’s a significant difference in them. 

 

Ryan’s plate has more greens on it, a toasted bagel, and a collection of various fruits. Shane’s plate, however, has a stack of waffles threatening to chase off the mountain of bacon and sausage links. There’s a secondary plate with fruit as well, but Shane notices that he’s been given almost entirely strawberries. Ryan’s plate doesn’t have any. 

 

“Wowza,” Shane looks up at Ryan. “You’re a chef?”

 

“What? No,” Ryan scoffs, finally picking up his fork to begin eating. His ears are slightly tinged, but he tries his best to keep his face stoic and cold. “Anybody can make some waffles, dude.” 

 

“I can’t,” Shane responds, still looking at the spread of food in awe. “Christ, I can’t even microwave a hot pocket without setting a goddamn house on fire.” 

 

“Oh, so you dabble in arson often?” Ryan scoffs, raising his eyebrows a little. 

 

This makes Shane smile. A goofy kind of smile. The one where you don’t  _ really  _ want to, but it’s uncontrollable. You can’t help it. It’s just there, on your face despite how much you fight it, and it’s not leaving anytime soon. 

 

“Yeah, I go around setting  _ loads  _ of places on fire,” Shane scoffs sarcastically. “Watch out, I’ll burn your bunker down too.” 

 

Ryan seems a little alarmed at this statement, the boy metaphorically taking a step back and removing himself from the playful conversation they were having. His smile seems to fade quickly, and it’s almost as if Shane can physically watch as the fence comes up around Ryan. Guarded. So very guarded. 

 

“So, what's up with the healthy breakfast?” Shane waves his fork towards Ryan’s half cleared plate. 

 

“Some of us have to stay in shape,” Ryan responds sharply. “Y’know, so we don’t end up pinned to the floor of a gas station.” 

 

Shane chooses to ignore this comment, but instead asks “So, like, what is  _ that _ ?”

 

“This?” Ryan points downwards at the unidentified object on his plate. “This is kale salad with chickpeas and avocado.” 

 

“That can’t taste good,” Shane shakes his head. “That makes me want to die just from hearing the ingredients.” 

 

Ryan rolls his eyes, looking down at his plate and letting out a bit of a sigh. Shane’s right, it tastes like complete ass, but he’s far too stubborn to admit that. Something about Shane’s smug arrogance just won’t let Ryan surrender. 

 

Still. Shane persists. “What about the bagel?” 

 

“What about it?” Ryan glances at that next. 

 

“It looks like trash,” Shane says. 

 

Ryan frowns, scoffing just slightly. He can’t denied that he’s a little peeved, but what else did he expect from inviting a total stranger into his home? “It’s whole wheat.” 

 

“And the green?” 

 

“Have you seriously never seen an avocado before? Like, honestly. Do you know what a vegetable is?” Ryan snaps at him in annoyance, but he can’t deny the challenging smirk on his face. Shane finds humor in this sort of banter, the mean rapport being something that he’s used to with his brothers. 

 

“You and your goddamn avocados!” Shane throws his hands up, mocking fake disbelief. “I can’t believe this, man. You’ve got some weird guacamole fetish.” 

 

“I do  _ not _ ,” Ryan gasps, his hand coming up to his chest. Shane can’t tell if he’s kidding or not, so as to not offend Ryan even further, he tries to cut back on the personal jabs. 

 

“Here,” Shane cuts a sausage link in half using the side of his fork, then stabs through it with a bit of waffle already on the utensil. He holds it outwards towards Ryan, a big smile spreading across his features a bit fondly. “Try some real food, dude.” 

 

“I’m not-“ Ryan starts out, but Shane holds a finger up and simply extends his arm further, bringing the food deeper into Ryan’s personal space. The tan one leans forward just slightly, slowly giving into the temptations. He leans forward even further, knowing he’s absolutely in arms reach. Then, as if it processes all at once, he quickly reaches up and grabs the fork from Shane’s hand. His cheeks flush in embarrassment, and he can’t quite understand why he just nearly let this grown man feed him like that. 

 

“S’good, right?” Shane grins widely. 

 

“Obviously anything is going to taste better than kale,” Ryan scoffs, averting his eyes from Shane’s stupid face. “Eat. Sun’s rising quickly.” 

 

“How can you tell?” Shane questions him, looking around the bunker in confusion. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s not exactly any windows around, dude.” 

 

Ryan looks at him, feels a snarky comeback on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t dare speak it. Shane watches him, waiting expectantly, but the clapback just never comes. He can’t deny the disappointment he feels. Why wouldn’t Ryan take the bait? They’ve been having easy bants all morning. Certainly, that was the perfect setup. Shane knows it was. But Ryan is guarded, so very guarded. 

 

The rest of breakfast passes by quietly, Shane clearing off his plate easily. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever get a decent meal like this again, he’s been living primarily off of junk food and he’s not looking forward to going back to it. As soon as he’s done, he stands, being careful to not bump his head against the dangling light fixtures. Ryan looks up at him, still working on some of the fruit on his plate, and they share another look of reluctance. 

 

“Just, uh,” Ryan waves over his shoulder. “Just put the plate in the sink.” 

 

“Okie dokie,” Shane moves around the breakfast bar so that he can pass through the dining room. The kitchen is less clean than it was last night, Ryan seemingly leaving all of the appliances he used for breakfast just on the counter. Shane sets his plate down in the sink, looking around at the marble countertops. He’ll never get past how nice this place is. He just won’t. 

 

“Guess I’m on my way then,” Shane comes back to the room, watching Ryan stand from the barstool. He comes up behind Shane, the height difference becoming painfully obvious. “Thanks, man. Could’ve died out there!

 

Ryan shrugs, moving in a way that suggests Shane to get going. In a grim voice, he says “You will.” 

 

“Yowch,” Shane brings a hand up to his chest as he navigates his way towards the big vault door. Ryan seems a bit urgent, like he just can’t wait to get Shane out, which only makes the big one feel like more of a burden. “That one hurt, Ryan.” 

 

Ryan rolls his eyes, but otherwise begins unlocking the first set of doors. Shane thinks the keypad is a bit overkill, but in retrospect, he knows no zombie would have enough cognitive memory to know how to work a keypad. Ryan’s just cautious, maybe a little crazy, but cautious nonetheless. 

 

“Okay,” Ryan waves him through. “Be safe out there, man.” 

 

Shane steps into the empty chamber, looking back at the small man longingly. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t. This bunker makes his U-Haul look like trailer trash. Besides that, he doesn’t exactly want to part with the only living thing he’s met in months. He misses  _ talking  _ to someone. Shane thinks it’s a miracle that he hasn’t gone insane, yet. 

 

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Ryan sighs, leaning downwards. He uses his ass to support the door, keeping it open while he rolls the ankle of his joggers up. “You’re completely helpless, aren’t you? You’re like a giant man-child.” 

 

“Ouch, once again!” Shane feigns an arrow shooting through his chest. “You fatally wound me, Ryan!” 

 

Ryan rolls his eyes, even though Shane can’t see it from this angle. He slides the butterfly knife out of his sock, straightens up, and then hands it over to Shane. 

 

Shane puts his hands up defensively, scared that the man who collects literature on serial killers has finally decided to kill him in this scary bunker. “Woah, woah, easy big guy! Easy.” 

 

“I’m not attacking you,” Ryan claims, holding his hands up, the knife tucked into his palm by his thumb. “Just giving you something. I won’t be there to have your back next time, so it’s nice to have something to defend yourself with.” 

 

“Oh,” Shane then greedily holds his hands out like an excited child receiving gifts. “Hand it over, lil man!” 

 

“I’m not little,” Ryan scoffs, placing the knife in Shane’s palms. The difference in their hand sizes doesn’t go unnoticed. 

 

Shane examines the knife with care, his fingers tracing over the smooth handle and monochromatic designs. He opens the blade up, careful of the sharpened edges, his thumb rubbing against the smooth silver. When he feels a divet in the material, he lifts his thumb up, examining what it is. 

 

Engraved into the blade is a very faint  _ J.B.  _ Shane squints at the initials, then looks up to meet Ryan in the eye. “JB?” 

 

Ryan’s eyes fall to the ground, the man backing up and creating space between himself and Shane. His shoulders bunch in, making him appear tiny and feeble. He looks up at Shane, then looks away just as fast. In a forced, strained voice, he mumbles “Don’t know. Picked it up off some corpse.” 

 

Shane Madej knows that is a load of bullshit, but he doesn’t care enough to stay and dissect the lie. Instead, he pockets the knife and gives a curt nod to the now anxious little man in front of him. 

 

“Alrighty. This’ll be where we depart, partna’,” Shane tips an imaginary cowboy hat. 

 

Ryan shifts around almost uncomfortably, his avoidant behavior rubbing Shane the wrong way. Still, despite this, he still manages to say “Alright. Be safe out there.” 

 

Shane opens his mouth to retort with a terribly constructed joke, but he notices Ryan’s tense shoulders and clenched jaw line, so he slowly lets his mouth come to a close. Shane was born and raised in the Midwest, a place where goodbyes last for approximately forty five minutes. One goodbye standing in the living room, another at the door. Then, you stand on the porch and talk for twenty more minutes, before finally walking down the driveway at the same pace as a snail. You stand by your car, and you bring up that topic that you got distracted from earlier in the evening. Midwestern goodbyes are engrained in Shane’s bloodstream, but Ryan exudes the presence of a West coast boy. 

 

Shane lifts the deadlock on the door, opening up the heavy vault to invite the summer heat in. Warmth blasts him in the face like a New Jersey bar fight, the sun personally placing Shane in a chokehold. He feels suffocated by the humidity, the air so heavy and formulated that he can taste the distinct flavor of copper in the atmosphere. Heatstroke teases at the core of his neck, his limbs groaning with lanquidity. 

 

He doesn’t look back. It would be weird to look back, wouldn’t it? It’s not as if they’re two lovers having an airport goodbye, no, just two men who happened to find each other in a gas station. For what reason would Shane need to turn and look back? 

 

There’s a moment of hesitation, an eerie silence that makes it hard to believe it’s seven in the morning. It’s dead quiet, and then he hears it. The sliding of the locks behind him. Ryan resealing his bunker door to prevent any wounded from stumbling in, Ryan locking Shane out of his life. They really were just passing strangers, two wayfaring souls whose paths temporarily overlapped. But that’s it. That’s all they are. Ryan slides that fifth lock in place, a noise that only sounds like the last nail being hammered further into the coffin. 

 

Ryan wishes that Shane looked back. 

 

What for? He doesn’t know. He truly doesn’t. All he knows is that when he emerges back into his living room, breathing in the crisp cool air that is untouched by the scorching heat outside, he feels a bit of remorse. The zombie apocalypse gets quite lonely. Quite lonely indeed. 

 

Ryan shakes his head, stepping further in and trying to clear all images of friendship from his mind. He can’t make  _ friends _ , friends  _ die.  _ Ryan knows not to get attached. People can’t be trusted, especially when it comes to surviving. Ryan would sooner let a corpse just completely devour him than allow another human into his life. The thought of caring about someone seems like a more painful death than cannibalism. 

 

Shane’s own mind keeps him busy the entire trek back into town. It’s easy to see which way to go; there’s only one city visible off in the distance. It would be very hard to get lost in the desert, considering it’s as barren as can be albeit the town that the two had narrowly escaped from last night. Shane thinks as he walks, a leisurely pace that does not compare to the heart-pounding running they were engaging in last night, the fancy switchblade spinning between his fingers as he practices opening it in the most efficient ways. 

 

He doesn’t want to go back to his U-Haul. He doesn’t. Sure, this Ryan guy might seem a little odd, and he certainly has a plethora of creepy books that are way too morbid and weird for the average human, but it’s better than nothing. Shane passes the time by watching DVD’s in the college community center on a cracked, static-y TV. He’s running out of batteries for the remote, though, and that’s what scares him most. What happens when he runs out of batteries? How is he going to pass the time then? It just seems a little obvious to go return to the only company he’s seen in months. Shane misses being around someone already, and judging by the sun’s placement in the sky, he hasn’t been walking for very long. 

 

What’s Shane to do as he ages? As he grows old? As fate, the cruel temptress that she is, snatches life right out from Shane Madej’s feet as if she’s performing a magic trick involving a table cloth. What is Shane to do when time catches up with him, and achy arthritis makes it impossible for him to bend down and touch his toes? Who will take care of him? Who will help him survive? There’s nobody else that can volunteer, Shane knows that he won’t find another living soul to keep him company. 

 

Bright imagery flashes in his mind, the hue red taking dominance over his mind. He feels beads of sweat clinging to his skin as the sun relentlessly harasses him, while his mind does not give him a break either. All he can see are the little rubies that were once pearls, all lined inside a mouth that would smile and make things okay. Blood stains porcelain, he learned. It touched her skin, and she never looked the same again. His little doll, with flesh between her teeth, her eyes greying around the outside and spreading blackened veins down her cheeks. She was once so beautiful. And then Shane had to ruin her. 

 

He decides, yes, he will find solace with another person. He misses the company of someone by his side, and he’s not going to let that pass by. He comes to this conclusion just as he’s reaching the city outskirts, so he quickly comes up with a flimsy excuse to get him to turn around. 

 

“I’ve gotta return his axe,” Shane says aloud, gesturing with his hands as if he’s waiting for a zombie to appear before him. “The dude needs his axe!”

 

No zombies come. Shane doesn’t know if he’s trying to summon them, but he does know that he wouldn’t mind using the new toy stashed inside his pocket. J.B., whoever that may be, took care of that knife. You can tell when you hold it in the palm of your hand. It was a well-loved weapon, and for that, she must be a beauty of a blade that Shane itches with curiosity to try it out. 

 

But Ryan was smart about when he sent Shane out, the city seems to be asleep. Literally. Shane didn’t know zombies slept, he’s holed himself up in his secluded safe haven for so long that he must admit he is not familiar with any of their habits. He knows their hostility, and he knows how smart they are, but that’s about as far as his intellect goes. Do they sleep like vampires? Do they eat anything other than brains? Can they be cured? 

 

Shane’s mind latches onto the last one. He gets a glimpse of the way her glasses broke and shattered as her decaying fingers tried to reach up and dig some of the broken pieces out of her mangled face. 

 

_ Can they be cured? Or was her death meaningless?  _

 

Shane Madej hasn’t thought of her in months. He was doing just fine, he was coping about as well as someone can during apocalypse. But Ryan stands a bit taller than her 5’4” body, and Shane is questioning his loyalty. He doesn’t know why this random man compares to her importance, but he feels guilty nonetheless. 

 

He shakes his head. No. Now is not the time to be playing guilty boyfriend. It has been eight months of solitude, he deserves to make a friend. He knows this. He  _ knows  _ this. 

 

The axe is exactly where Shane expected it to be, tossed on the floor of a gas station office. The time stamps for employees are scattered across the tile flooring, dampened and smeared from the sprinklers that went off the day before. Ryan’s axe rests beneath the leg of the desk that Shane had to climb over in order to enter the office, but it’s still there, safe and sound. 

 

As Shane picks it up, his eyes catch on the refractions of light that are bouncing off of the broken glass and creating little tiny rainbows on the popcorn ceiling. It’s not the holograms he’s fascinated with, but rather the drops of maroon brown tainting those glass shards. Ryan hurt himself breaking this window out yesterday.  Blood dries differently these days. It’s not as vibrant, it’s much more lackluster than how it used to be. Maybe that’s just the nostalgia effect, though. Shane knows he likes to glamorize the “good ol’ days” far too much. To him, everything has dulled to how it used to be. 

 

Shane picking the axe up off the ground seems to be about the end of his good luck. The scrape of metal against linoleum echoes throughout the gas station, awakening the beasts lurking out of Shane’s sight. It starts with a footstep, a clunk of boot against the floor, and then it breaks into a sprint through the store. Shane listens to these footsteps, frozen in fear as they draw closer and closer, his mind completely blanking on what his plan to do was once he was approached by a corpse.

 

_ Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. _

 

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Shane exclaims as the maimed body hurls itself into the office, the acceleration being halted by the desk blocking the doorway.

 

The corpse looks down with its lack of eyes, then back up at Shane, quickly scrambling over the wooden surface to get to food. You can usually tell which zombies are more deprived than others, they have a more distinguishable scent amongst the starving ones. They smell more like rot, like their decomposing process has been sped up twice as fast. Their composure is unhealthy, resembling a mismatched human that was reassembled after being hit by three trucks. Hungry corpses are faster, less predictable, and twice as deadly. They go by the same morals that humans do; the more they want something, the more hostile they become to reach that goal. Hungry corpses will do absolutely anything to get a meal on their plates. 

 

Shane backs up into the wall, the glass crunching beneath his shoes. He holds the weapon close to his chest in an attempt to shield his heart, his mind panicking with all the different scenarios that are about to transpire. 

 

Something in Shane overrides his anxiety. Call it a survival instinct, or a natural fight or flight response. Whatever it is, it causes his arms to move involuntarily. He hauls the axe through the air, bludgeoning the zombie upside the head with the side of the blade. It wasn’t a clean slice, but rather a baseball bat swing. 

 

This gives him enough time to shimmy through the window that he crawled out of just yesterday afternoon. This time, he keeps his grip on the axe tight, and he takes off running faster than he did with Ryan by his side. Making this route for the second time doesn’t seem as bad this time around, or maybe Shane’s body is just adjusting to the physical labor he’s been doing. He runs, not feeling as much of a burn between his lungs, so he runs some more. He doesn’t slow down once they’re outside of the city. He can’t. He doesn’t have a choice to. 

 

Three zombies were waiting outside that window for Shane, and instead of picking a fight that was clearly outnumbered, the same survival instinct that gave him courage just moments before strictly told him to run. So that’s what he did. He runs until the paved roads become sandy, and the zombies run right behind him. He’s never felt so much adrenaline course through his body before, it’s as if he shot the sunrise right through his spiderweb veins. He’s got the sun inside him, and the torturous burn is singing the edges of his organs with each step that he takes.

 

Shane has never been more relieved to see a fake cactus in his life. The sun is much higher in the sky now, creating mirages off in the distance of hope and promise land that Shane knows not to follow. It’s easily up towards the 90’s temperature wise, only making the rot hanging in the air stink twice as bad. Humid decomposition just might be one of the worst smells that Shane’s ever come across. It’s something close to rotten fish and damp soil, but there’s a certain aroma to death that just can’t be described, no matter what. 

 

Shane slides down into the descending staircase, his legs tripping over themselves as he clambers down towards Ryan’s bunker. He can hear the raspy screaming of the corpses approaching the grave that Ryan’s dug his shelter in, and Shane just hopes to god that the small man can hear him from inside this steel trap of a home. 

 

“Hey, man, hey! Ryan! Hey buddy, it’s me, Shane!” Shane pounds on the vault-like door. He tries to lift the large slate that is a doorknob, but Ryan locked it tightly after Shane departed from the bunker. Shane’s fear only grows so much more intense as he glances up at the top of the staircase, seeing the head of a single corpse peer over to investigate. Shane has led them to his own grave, and now he has to lie in it. The dirt walls surrounding him seem to close in, narrowing around his thickening body until he feels nothing but the dank slick of desert mud dripping down on his clothes. Worms burst through the surface of the earth, taunting Shane as he feels thousands of baby spiders crawl out from his hair and move down his back. Shane turns back to the door, his throat hoarse as he imagines it filling with sand and glass, the boy desperately attempting to shout out “Really need you to open up, bud. Bit of a tough crowd out here! I’ve… I’ve got your axe! I don’t know how to use it, though. So, like, maybe help me out?” 

 

There’s a clatter, and when Shane spins around, he watches as a corpse falls down each and every step, approaching him so rapidly that he truly does not know what else to do. His back presses against the metal door so tightly that his sweaty skin sticks to the surface, and he watches as the corpse rises to its feet in front of him. It lost a jaw along the way, the fragmented bone now hanging off of the face by just a few stringy tendons and a couple of maggots. It takes a shaky step forward, an unsettling crunch echoing through the shallow ditch that Shane’s trapped in. That crack doesn’t stop it, because the creature only lunges itself at Shane swiftly. 

 

He narrowly moves out of the way, sucking his whole body to one side of the entryway, a loud scream bursting from his mouth as he smacks his flat palm against the door frantically. 

 

Shane’s weight gives out when the door behind him is suddenly gone, the tall man stumbling backwards and losing his balance. Before he can topple over, an arm is slinging around his shoulders, pulling him down and close to a snug being. Warm. Human. 

 

_ Bam! Bam!  _

 

Shane’s face is buried in homely fabric, the feeling of a whole figure pressed against him calming some of the bloodshot nerves making his whole body vibrate with terror. He inhales through his mouth, tasting the scent surrounding him, relaxing at the smell of laundry detergent and deodorant. His shoulders slope downwards once he realizes he can’t hear the shrieks of a hungry corpse, but his eardrums ring with something else. 

 

“ _ Ow _ ,” Shane reaches one hand up, rubbing his ear as if in pain. He looks up, seeing Ryan’s stone cold face staring out towards the staircase intently. Ryan is driven by dominance, his aura exuding primitive instincts and focus.  

 

Shane lets his eyes wander, his body shaking with horror as his fingers tightly grip into the fabric of Ryan’s shirt. He’s hyperventilating, and each inhale that Shane takes, he becomes more and more aware of Ryan’s arm locked around him that is keeping him nuzzled down into his chest. Shane is so much taller that he has to crouch, but it’s safe. It’s entirely safe. 

 

The source of Shane’s vibrating eardrums appears to be the pistol locked into Ryan’s steady hand, the gun held outwards at such a calm, still position that it almost scares Shane. Anybody that comfortable with handling a gun has a very clear personality trait, and it’s usually a trait that Shane Madej avoids. But, given the situation, he thinks he would trust Ryan with anything. 

 

Shane opens his mouth to say something, but movement out of the corner of his eye distracts him. Another corpse falling down the set of stairs, clumsily attempting to stand with broken legs. Ryan pulls the trigger, and the recoil makes Shane flinch and squeeze his eyes shut as he imagines the splattered brain matter decorating the staircase. Brains are a lot chunkier than they are in horror movies, and Shane doesn’t exactly want to face the nausea that always overcomes him each time he is exposed to the physical particles of someone’s entire identity. 

 

Ryan’s body relaxes, the man tucking the gun into the waistband of his jeans. With his second hand now free, he cups the side of Shane’s face gently and lifts it upwards to examine the man’s head for any bodily injuries. Shane doesn’t see this as medical concern, however. He feels Ryan’s hand on his cheek, and he sees the oil slick eyes roaming over his face, and he feels a little bit of some flutter happening in his stomach. Though, that’s probably just anxiety. Yeah, definitely the anxiety. 

 

“Jesus Christ,” Ryan exhales once he clears Shane for wounds. He releases the man, pulling him inside the chamber by the shirt sleeve, kicking aside a spare arm that is blocking the vault from shutting. He turns to look at Shane, a man who is sweaty and clutching onto an axe as if his life depends on it, and he feels… relieved. He feels relieved to know that this person is back here in the safety of his bunker. Ryan is driven to protect people, and he can see the flicker of a purpose igniting within the hopeless rubble that is Shane Madej. 

 

Ryan shakes his head, reaching out to wipe some of the blood splatter off of Shane’s cheek. Most of the sludge managed to miss his face when Ryan first took those shots, he was sheltered by the man hiding him from the ruthless killings that Ryan executed on his front door step. 

 

With absolutely no hints of hostility or repulsion, Ryan sighs “What the hell am I going to do with you?” 

 

Shane lets the smile spread across his face, his eyes crinkling around the corners like they always do. He lifts his arms above his head, but not much because this chamber was not built for giants such as Shane Madej. 

 

“I hath returned thee axe!”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a bit of a filler chapter, and for that I’m sorry!! but i mostly just wanted to build some strength in their personalities so bear with me and stick thru this nonsense of their inner monologues

Shane was back in the same pajamas from last night. Ryan had made multiple comments about how helpless Shane was, and how it’s a miracle he’s even survived for this long, but none of his snarky remarks ever bit with hostility. He still took it upon himself to throw Shane’s clothes in the washer, and now he is sat down on the floor next to Shane, picking glass shards out of the big man’s rib cage. 

 

“I seriously don’t know how you didn’t notice an entire window in your side,” Ryan says, his eyes flicking up before focusing back on the task at hand. His hands are big for his size, Shane notices. But the long fingers don’t affect how nimble they are. He works effortlessly, smoothly wiping the bloodied skin with rubbing alcohol and holding the tweezers with poise each time he finds another shard lodged beneath the skin. 

 

“I was a little preoccupied,” Shane responds with a scoff, “Can you believe the audacity of some corpses? Unbelievable! Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you can follow me home, buddy!” 

 

Ryan smiles at this, the same way he’s began to smile at all of Shane’s jokes. Ryan brushes his thumb against Shane’s spotted skin, his finger catching onto another patch of sharpness. He picks the tweezers back up, leans in a little further, his free hand sliding Shane’s shirt up just a little bit further. 

 

“You must’ve rolled out the window wrong,” Ryan says. “You know, James Bond never got any glass stuck in him. I think you need to step up your game, big guy.” 

 

The banter is easy and comfortable, which may have been one of the reasons Shane came back. It’s rare to find someone who could match his sarcasm before the outbreak, and it’s purely impossible to find someone during a zombie apocalypse who doesn’t want to eat brains. Ryan seems to be a bit too good to be true. 

 

“I don’t know how to break this to you, but I’m not James Bond,” Shane sighs, holding his arm up to give Ryan clear access to his ribs. “I tried! Believe me, I tried. But puberty did  _ not _ make me a special agent.”  

 

“Oh, are spies, like, a rite of passage now?” Ryan breathes out. He doesn’t laugh, his eyes focused very intensely on a very specific shard that’s embedded particularly deep. He looks up at Shane to smile, but then he pinches the skin a little. Shane has noticed that Ryan will pinch him before pulling a shard out, maybe to warn him of the incoming pain? 

 

“Yeah. You turn 13 and you’re given your first gun,” Shane responds. “That’s just, like, the way of life where I’m from.” 

 

“Where  _ are  _ you from?” Ryan doesn’t miss a beat. He pinches, pulls out a tiny shard, and then quickly holds a cotton ball over the wound to soak up any of the blood gushing out. 

 

“Chi-town, baby!” Shane pumps a fist into the air. 

 

“Jesus, that’s far away, don’t you think? The hell are you doing out here?” Ryan stops playing doctor to give Shane an incredulous look. 

 

“Moved out west for someone,” Shane says vaguely. He thinks about how curly her hair would get, but more specifically, how  _ frizzy _ it would become in humid weather. She never seemed to care, though. Her hair was wild like her, and she made sure that the rest of the world knew just how free her spirit is.  _ Was _ . 

 

“Yeah?” Ryan lowers his hands, looking at Shane curiously. He’s not opposed by the man’s presence here anymore, if Shane’s going to stay, they might as well just skip the formalities and awkward first’s, just jump right to being comfortable roommates. Roommates who pry in sensitive topic matter, roommates that have absolutely no sense of boundaries. “Who was she?”

 

Shane’s face twists up as he thinks about her. Instead of saying anything, though, he just turns to Ryan and lets out an airy laugh. “What are ya, trying to unlock my tragic backstory? Please level up to try again.” 

 

“Jeez,” Ryan scoffs, but he doesn’t press the topic any longer. He just smiles, shakes his head, and returns to plastering bandaids all over Shane like he’s smoothing out wallpaper onto a blank room. 

 

“So what about you?” Shane asks, then sees all of the possibilities that he’s given Ryan for snarky one-line responses. “Where are you from?” 

 

“Orange, California,” Ryan responds warily. 

 

“Orange!” Shane repeats, a loud chuckle bubbling from him. Ryan’s hands drop away, so he checks his side for any further damage. Once pleased with the results he lets the shirt drop back down, very conscious of how the fabric cuts off at his waist. Shane wraps his arms around his center to cover his body. “Now that’s a special name. What, were you centered between the towns Red and Yellow?” 

 

Ryan rolls his eyes, shaking his head in bitter annoyance. He’s not annoyed at Shane, he’s annoyed with himself for finding that joke funny. 

 

“Shut up, man. Anyway, uh, since you’re… here… I should probably give you the tour, huh?” 

 

“I know where the bathroom is, I know where the kitchen is. What more could I possibly need?” Shane tilts his head to the side, noticing the way the mid afternoon light setting casts angel flares against the coast of Ryan’s face. Rocky tides cling to the shores of his jawline, his relaxed skin pulling Shane further beneath the wave. 

 

“There’s… more,” Ryan laughs. “I’ve been working on expanding, but I’ll show you what I have. 

 

Shane expects a guest room, maybe a master bathroom, and that infamous laundromat that Shane’s clothes seem to frequent often. He doesn’t expect much, but Ryan certainly elucidates the shock on Shane’s goofy face when they venture down the hall, past the bathroom. This is further than Shane has ever gotten, and he’s already in complete shock at the expanse of land he’s being shown. 

 

“Here’s, uh, my room,” Ryan starts off simple, pushing a door open and standing in the entrance. He’s guarding Shane from entering, but he still switches the light on for the tall boy to peer inside. 

 

Ryan’s room is simple; a bed, one nightstand on the messy side, a closet door pushed open to show a wardrobe in disarray, movie posters lining the walls, and a TV set on top of a wide bookshelf showcasing countless amounts of films. 

 

“Hey, no fair! You get a TV? Dude, there’s a perfectly good living room out there,” Shane can’t believe that the little man has been hoarding genuine entertainment. 

 

“It’s  _ my _ bunker, man,” Ryan closes the door quickly, discomfort tight in his shoulders. “That’s how I grew up. If you want a TV, you save up for one, and then you can watch whatever you wanted as long as it was in your room.” 

 

“You grow up in communist Russia?” Shane scoffs, following the smaller one down the hall. 

 

“That’s not how communism works, dumbass,” Ryan scoffs, but pushes open the next door. “This is the library. I have light reading out in the living room, but this is where everything else is. This is sort of… neutral area. If you need to be alone, come in here. There’s an oil diffuser in the back that creates a lavender atmosphere used for calming anxiety and easing stress.” 

 

Shane looks down at Ryan instead of examining the vast rows of bookshelves. The walls are lined with stacks of books, a collection that puts small town bookstores to shame. But this isn’t what Shane’s looking at, no. He’s looking at Ryan. Ryan gestures outwards as he talks about something else, he’s very expressive with his hands. He is proud of this place. He’s proud of the home that he’s built. He is opening up that front door into something he put time, effort, energy, and no doubt thousands upon thousands of dollars into. He is sharing all of that with some strange man who led corpses to his front door, and for what? Snarky comments? That’s all Shane has to offer. 

 

They skip a door walking down the hallway, the one parallel to Ryan’s bedroom. Shane watches how Ryan steps aside and moves across the hall as if he’s steering clear of it, maybe something subconscious. 

 

“What’s in here?” Shane asks, his fingers touching the doorknob. He’s not going to open it without Ryan’s permission, but he’s mostly reaching outwards just to gauge the small one’s reaction. “Gotta sex chamber? Is this your weird BDSM room?” 

 

Ryan stiffens up, his shoulders drawing in tensely. His eyes shoot to Shane, then back down to the doorknob, then back up at Shane. He’s got the look of a nervous deer, and Shane’s only holding the barrel of a gun right in front of his face. 

 

“That’s… That’s storage. Nothing but clutter in there,” Ryan shakes his head, shifting his weight between his two feet. He feels scared, and Shane can tell. The little man’s hands stay perfectly still by his side; a clear contrast from the way he usually talks with them. 

 

_ This must be how he looks when he’s afraid,  _ Shane thinks to himself. His fingers curl around the doorknob as if going to turn it, his eyes watching the way that Ryan’s chest expands with a deep inhale.  _ But what is he so afraid of?  _

 

“Sounds cool. I wanna scavenge through like a mini garage sale!” Shane laughs, twisting the doorknob. Shane Madej knows boundaries, sure, but that doesn’t mean he won’t test them. He’s not dipping his toes into the water, no, he’s full on waist deep in the ocean, waiting to see if the tides pull him under. How far will Ryan let him go? 

 

“No-“ Ryan chokes out, taking the smallest step forward before locking up in place. He freezes, his throat tightening as his gaze fixates on the turning doorknob. It squeaks as it’s moved, after all, this door hasn’t been opened in six months. Ryan’s eyes flicker back up to Shane’s, a silent plea written on his face. “There’s… cobwebs. It’s gross. Smells kind of like cheese, too.” 

 

Shane hesitates, his hand extended as if to push the door open. Ryan’s voice was shaking, however, so Shane believes he’s found that threshold. It didn’t take long. 

 

“Alrighty then!” Shane drops away from the door, strutting last Ryan down the hall. “What’s the next stop, conductor Ryan?” 

 

Ryan takes a second to recover, his arms shaking as he adjusts his shirt around his sweating body. Shane’s wandering down the hall, but Ryan pauses to look at the closed door with a bit of despair and longing in his eyes. He knows he can’t leave that door closed forever. He just doesn’t want this new person coming along and opening it for him. He can’t stomach to let someone in just yet. The door remains closed. 

 

Shane pauses when he notices that the little one isn’t following on his heel. He turns, seeing Ryan still fixed to that spot, the man’s wide eyes staring down at the floor as if he’s locked into a memory he just can’t shake. Shane knows the feeling; it paralyzes you. Once you remember something you’ve been repressing inside your mind, it consumes you like a parasite, or a plague. You see it every time you close your eyes, you hear it above all other sounds around you. It becomes your whole atmosphere, and you have no other choice than to breathe it all in. 

 

Ryan pivots in the hallway just slightly, turning his body towards Shane. His posture is guarded, but it usually is. Shane notices the way his knees are turned inwards, though, and he concludes that beneath that guarded posture is a very, very scared person. Not only that, but… alone. Ryan exudes the aura of someone who is alone. 

 

Shane looks away, guilt wracking his body. He caused that. He wanted to test this one’s limits, and he pushed too hard on something he shouldn’t have. Now he’s damaged what might be his only chances of making a friend. 

 

Shane knows that look. The confusion. He knows what look is on Ryan’s face, he wears it just like Shane does. What Ryan is being so venomously haunted by is the ghost of grief dripping down his back, breathing hot air down his tanned neck. Shane can practically see the phantom of death wrapping it’s long, bony, rotting fingers around Ryan’s head. 

 

The thing is, everybody lost somebody during the outbreak. 

 

“Her name was Sara,” Shane speaks up, breaking the thick silence between them. His voice is faint, as if it’s a lake of water slowly pouring in rather than a tidal wave crashing down. Ryan looks up, and Shane imagines that his toes are getting wet as River Madej reaches him. “She was my girlfriend. She drew cartoons on napkins and taped them to our bedroom wall, she ate dinosaur chicken nuggets for dinner three nights a week, she would sing terrible, terrible 80’s songs to me whenever I had a bad day. She moved out west for her job, and I didn’t think twice about following. She was what I had before the outbreak… she was  _ all  _ I had, really.” 

 

There’s a pregnant pause between the two, uncertainty materializing in the air. Shane hates eye contact, but he still finds the courage to maintain staring at Ryan in an attempt to measure the man’s reaction. Shane isn’t looking for a pity party, but rather some relief if Ryan were to hear some of that tragic backstory he was prodding for earlier. 

 

“What happened to her?” Ryan asks timidly. He already knows the answer. 

 

Shane shrugs, shoving his hands into his pockets. He remembers the way her blood stained the sink. He remembers the crack of the basin. He remembers the snap of her glasses. The break of her face. 

 

“Lost her,” Shane says simply. He’s not ready to give that much up to Ryan yet, he doesn’t know if he ever will be ready. That is his demon to carry, he will not allow Ryan to hear this troubled thought under any circumstance. “But… I kept on. We all lose some, we just have to…” 

 

He trails off only because he doesn’t know where this motivational speech is supposed to go. There’s no hope, there truly isn’t. It’s hard to stay positive when the world is in shambles. Shane can’t even bluff, not even to comfort the man who has only welcomed Obnoxious Shane into his safe home. 

 

“Live the life they couldn’t,” Ryan finishes for Shane. The two look at each other, but Ryan’s the first to break away this time. His voice is timid as he says “That’s… That’s how I keep my mind from melting through all of this. Just have to remind myself to live the life that they can’t.” 

 

Shane nods, his familiar smile returning as the hall drains of all the pain and sorrow the two were just remembering. “Yeah, that’s the spirit, buddy! Ghandi’s shaking in his boots!” 

 

“Shut up,” Ryan rolls his eyes, but a smile still appears nonetheless. He takes a step forward, than another, and then he’s by Shane’s side. He looks upwards, his mouth scrunched to the side in just the slightest way. “Do you want to see the workout room?” 

 

“ _ Workout room _ ?” Shane exclaims, trying his best to make this man feel better. “Christ, Ryan. Did you build an entire underground  _ mansion _ ?!” 

 

“Yes,” Ryan says matter of factly, taking a turn down the hall to the left. The hall opens up into an octagonal shape, doors located on each side. Ryan has a circular rug thrown into the middle, which Shane looks at with a frown. Couldn’t get an octagon rug? “The rest of these rooms you can explore yourself. They’re pretty much a free for all.” 

 

Shane glances at him but then sets out with a nod, heading straight to the door towards his right. The door opens outwards, a waft of laundry detergent billowing out like steam. Shane doesn’t have to step inside to see the small room with a washer and a dryer, a small folding table, and a clothes line with a pair of pants pinned to it. 

 

He grows bored quickly, moving onto the next room. Ryan shuts the door behind him, following Shane with a faint smile on his face. Yeah, Shane’s a bit clueless, but in a way it’s sort of… endearing? God, what is he thinking?

 

Shane stumbles into the next room, being met by workout equipment and an open shower. There’s more weights than possibly necessary, but he looks over at Ryan’s bandages arms and he remembers, oh, right, someone who actually has definition in their biceps. 

 

“You use that shower?” Shane asks, raising an eyebrow over his shoulder. 

 

“Yeah,” Ryan nods as if it’s obvious. 

 

“Okay, remind me to not come in here when you’re working out,” Shane responds, moving to the next room. 

 

Ryan rolls his eyes, something that seems to follow every sentence out of Shane’s mouth more frequent than punctuation. He closes the door, slowly trailing Shane to the next room. 

 

“As if you’ll ever step foot in here,” he laughs, reaching over to poke at Shane’s skinny arms. “You ever lift a weight in your life?” 

 

Shane doesn’t seem to mind the teasing, he’s not a sensitive guy. He takes it with pride, actually. He lifts his arms up, flexing what very little muscle he has. 

 

“What, these guns?” He kisses his bicep. “You  _ wish  _ you had this body, Ryan.” 

 

Ryan bursts into a laugh, a wonderfully obnoxious sound in every single way. Shane turns and heads into the next room so that he can avoid beaming such a smile at the sound of making someone laugh. It’s uncontrollable, though. He heads straight into what seems like a murder room with a grin on his face. 

 

It doesn’t last long. As soon as his eyes land on the table with machetes lined up, the smile drops, and he quickly looks around to take in the other various weapons. The walls have pegs sticking out, that way it can hold up the  _ assload _ of guns lining the room from floor to ceiling. The only way to describe it is an assload. No other measure can do it justice. 

 

“Christ,” Shane takes a step back, but Ryan only walks in very casually. 

 

Ryan picks up a serated machete with ease, running his fingers along the edge with a look of concentration on his face as if he’s cleaning something off the blade. Once satisfied, he returns it back to its place, adjusting it slightly until he’s pleased with its placement amongst the other saws and axes. Shane notices the axe that he risked his life for on the edge of the table, surrounded by much smaller knives lined in such precise, careful rows. 

 

“You’re a serial killer,” Shane stares. 

 

Ryan blinks at him for a moment, and then says “Yeah, I mean,  _ technically.  _ But do corpses really count as people?” 

 

“Have you ever killed a human?” Shane asks, them shakes his head. “No, new question; are you going to kill  _ me _ ?”

 

“Maybe,” Ryan says, twiddling a knife between his fingers. “Haven’t decided yet.” 

 

Shane takes another step backwards, which only makes Ryan burst into another big laugh. He’s got a laugh that’s like gas, it fills whatever room he’s in. Shane stares at him, the way his eyes crinkle by the sides, the brightness emitting from him in the form of chuckles, and Shane feels nothing but nerves start to take over his body. Why? Why is he nervous?

 

“Fuck you, man,” Shane scoffs, but there’s still a smirk on his face. “I’ve had it with your weird torture room. I’m done with this tour! I demand to use the TV!” 

 

“Alright, alright,” Ryan ushers him out, shutting the door behind them and moving back towards the hall. Shane glances at all the unexplored rooms, but he figures that he’ll get to them eventually. He’s not exactly  _ going  _ anywhere. 

 

He looks over at the man who locked up only moments before. Ryan is a lot more than just what’s on the surface. He knows he just met the guy, but Shane has a feeling that it’s going to be a long time before he meets the  _ real  _ Ryan. Which is fine. Again, it’s not as if Shane’s going anywhere anytime soon. Where else is there to be besides right here besides the mystery man himself? 

 

“So…” They’re in the living room now. Shane’s sitting on the couch with a pillow on his lap, playing with the loose threads of the case. “Are you, like, crazy?” 

 

“What?” Ryan asks, turning around from where he’s trying to connect the television to the wall outlet behind a painting. They’re trying to decide on which movie to watch, but it proves to be difficult when Ryan likes horror films and Shane likes comedies. 

 

“All of this,” Shane gestures around them, “All of this seems like the type of stuff you do when you’re crazy.” 

 

“Newsflash,” Ryan turns around. “It’s fucking survival, dude.” 

 

“No, no, this isn’t survival. Survival is shitting on a leaf and sleeping inside a dead bear to stay warm.  _ This _ is comfortable living,” Shane runs his hands across the plush sofa. It’s smooth, and the cushions are soft. Shane hasn’t slept on anything this nice for eight months, he almost forgot how lovely sleep can feel. “You were preparing for this, weren’t you?”

 

Ryan looks away, embarrassed. He doesn’t like to be called crazy, he’s heard it all his life. Ryan Bergara, the conspiracist. Ryan Bergara, the tin hat type of guy. Ryan Bergara, crazy. 

 

“Well,” Ryan exhales. He slouches over a little to plug the auxiliary cord in, but mostly just trying to look preoccupied so that he doesn’t have to look at the man who now lives with him. “I wasn’t exactly expecting a zombie apocalypse. I was more ready for a nuclear war. The state of politics before the outbreak were horrendous, I just figured… it was only a matter of time.” 

 

“Until?” 

 

“Until Russia dropped a bomb on us, until North Korea declared war, until anything,” Ryan shrugs. “I didn’t want to get drafted. I just wanted to hide down here with-“ 

 

Ryan stops in his tracks, shaking his head and standing up to his full height. “What about  _ Shaun of the Dead _ ? It’s horror  _ and  _ comedy.” 

 

Shane doesn’t press the subject for too long. He accepts Ryan’s subject change, chiming off with “I’m tired of zombies, man.” 

 

They bicker for a little bit longer, neither of them liking the other’s suggestions at all. Eventually, Shane suggests that Ryan goes and blindly picks something from the shelf, which seems to be a happy medium between the two. However, Shane doesn’t trust Ryan to pick, so he stands in the doorway for Ryan’s bedroom while the tan one covers his eyes with his hand, running his fingertips along the spines of various movies. 

 

“No peeking,” Shane says, his voice taunting. 

 

“I’m not, asshole,” Ryan’s hand lands on a movie. He slides it out, holding it up towards the direction of the door, and then slowly lifting his hand from his eyes. He looks at the movie chosen, then lifts his eyebrows in mild surprise. “Oh.” 

 

“Oh?” Shane says. He doesn’t step into the room, there is a very, very thin threshold that he refuses to cross. Instead, he leans against the doorway, his midriff exposing a pale belly to an avoidant Ryan. 

 

“I… wouldn’t mind watching it,” Ryan says slowly, hesitant. 

 

Shane’s reaction isn’t what Ryan expected. Shane simply nods, then lifts himself up off the doorframe, turning to head back towards the living room. 

 

“Okay, um,” Ryan stumbles to follow him, pressing the DVD into Shane’s hands. He glances up at the big guy, then looks away and says “I’m going to go get snacks. Go ahead and get it started.” 

 

“Say no more,” Shane waves him off calmly. It’s so comfortable, they both feel as if they’ve met before. Maybe in a past life, one that wasn’t doomed for isolation in a bunker for all eternity. 

 

Ryan imagines what this past life would be like as he heads into the kitchen, the sounds of Shane fumbling with the DVD case fading behind him. 

 

Maybe the two were best friends. Maybe they’d come over to watch the game together, or meet up at bars after work to share a plate of nachos. Ryan never really had a best friend before the outbreak, nobody was eccentric enough to tolerate Ryan’s bizarre interests or obsessive behavior. Ryan gets locked onto the things that fascinate him, as if they’ve deeply rooted themselves in his brain and he cannot possibly uproot it without taking off his whole head as well. Nobody really had the time or patience to sit and listen to Ryan drone on and on about murder mysteries or cryptid paranormal. He never had a best friend, they all grew bored. It would be nice to imagine a world where he could meet Shane and see if the man would befriend him anyway. 

 

_ Don’t be stupid, Bergara _ , he thinks to himself.  _ Shane’s only here because you have a bunker. Don’t flatter yourself, you’ll get a big head. This isn’t friendship, he is merely trying to survive. Don’t get your hopes up _ . 

 

Ryan heeds his own advice, returning to the living room as quietly as he can. He won’t get attached to Shane, he won’t allow it. People just  _ leave _ , whether they leave due to fatal causes or not. He won’t allow himself to be disrupted by the presence of another living being, especially a being stupid enough to become a corpse if left unattended for too long. If Shane’s only here out of survival, then Ryan can play that game too. His instincts are to close himself off, to not allow this man in under any circumstances. For survival. 

 

“Ooh, is that popcorn?” Shane purrs as soon as Ryan approaches the recliner.

 

Ryan stands in front of the recliner, holding a bowl of popcorn and two beers. He glances at the one-man-seat that would guarantee safety, but then he looks at Shane’s eager face examining the bowl with hope.  _ He probably hasn’t had lunch _ . Ryan’s thought process begins to spiral with the need to feed Shane, his caretaker instincts overpowering the need to survive.

 

“Do you want some?” Ryan asks cautiously. He looks down at the recliner again, and then at the space next to Shane on the couch. As if following his line of sight, Shane moves his legs off of the cushions in order to make room for Ryan to sit. 

 

Which he does. 

 

He chooses Shane over the solo chair, but he is still careful to keep a distance between them. He uses the popcorn bowl to serve as a barrier between them, but still offers Shane one of the beers. 

 

“I love popcorn,” Ryan states. 

 

“There’s no way you love it more than me,” Shane retorts, which Ryan instantly takes offense to. 

 

Before he can get all riled up, Shane picks up the TV remote and presses play on the movie that the two compromised on. Ryan shoves his mouth full of the deliciously salty kernels in order to keep himself from biting insults at Shane, but honestly, how dare he insinuate he’s a bigger kernelhead than Ryan Bergara? 

 

Shane uncaps his beer, watching the opening credits appear on screen. It’s a stupid movie for two grown men to watch, but what else would they do? Sit and read all day?

 

The bandages on Shane’s side stick like hot and sweaty window clings decorating a home for the holidays. Shane’s snowy skin still drips red down the ivory, but Ryan’s handiwork keeps all the wounds patched up. Shane’s fingers brush against the spots where it hurts, looking over at the very doctor who made it hurt  _ less.  _ He… doesn’t mind being here. He doesn’t mind staying. Not because of the riches and vast entertainment that Ryan has, or the cozy furniture and plump amounts of food, but because there’s someone to soak up Shane’s pain like a sponge. Shane just hopes that the man doesn’t drown in it, so he knows that he’ll ring Ryan out every once in awhile if the little man will let him. 

 

Shane looks back to the screen, starting the first of their many, many movie nights that were to come, a bold beginning right off the bat for the two. 

  
Two grown men in a zombie apocalypse, sharing a cold one with each other, watching none other than  _ Legally Blonde.  _


	4. Chapter 4

After day three, Shane starts to get bored. 

 

He doesn’t have the patience to sit in one spot and watch another movie, nor does he want to delve into Ryan’s weird murder books that are considered “light reading.” He starts experimenting in the kitchen to curb some of that boredom, which results in four days of Ryan having to taste whatever disgusting concoction that Shane thought to conjure up that day. But once those four days passed, he quickly grew tired of that as well, and now his palms itch with anticipation. 

 

Now, he paces outside the workout room. He can see Ryan inside, lying on a bench and lifting dumbbells above his head. The sounds of the vinyl creasing beneath his shoulder blades is drowned out by his loud, extraneous grunting. For such a little guy, Ryan makes quite a lot of sounds when he works out. 

 

Ryan keeps seeing Shane out of the corner of his eye, but his morning routine isn’t complete, and he still has yet to go through all his leg sets. After what seems like the fortieth time that Shane passes by in front of the open door, Ryan finally places his weights down and sits up, his sweaty back peeling off of the bench he was lying on. He looks towards the door, waiting for Shane to pass by once again like a ghost trying to nervously haunt their first person. 

 

“Alright, Madej,” Ryan calls out. “Come in here.” 

 

Shane stops in his tracks and slowly peeks around the doorframe to peer at Ryan. Ryan is drenched in sweat, little droplets rolling off of him like the same condensation dripping from his water bottle. His chest expands and collapses rapidly with each inhale that he takes, his hands lifting his shirt up to wipe the beads of sweat off of his forehead with the hem of his shirt. Shane doesn’t miss the flash of tummy he sees, and he certainly doesn’t miss the muscles carved out of marble hidden beneath that shirt. Michelangelo would be jealous of the body that Ryan’s sculpted for himself. 

 

Shane nervously places one hand against the doorframe, nervously creeping around the side of it to reveal about half of his face. His fingers tap against the wood with trepidation, but Ryan just stares at him blankly. 

 

“Well?” Ryan gestures for him to come further in, but Shane remains rooted in the doorway. “Spit it out, you giant. You look fucking weird.”

 

It bursts out of Shane like a balloon that got popped. He steps into the workout room, lifting his arms above his head and stomping one foot on the ground as he exclaims “I’m bored!”

 

Ryan doesn’t look surprised, in fact, he doesn’t even look fazed. Shane’s been here for about a week and a half now, and from what Ryan has picked up on from the man’s personality is that he is very easy to entertain, but also very easy to bore. Ryan’s no doctor, but it wouldn’t be a shock if Shane were to inform him of some disorder such as ADHD taking root in the mind of Madej. 

 

“Yeah?” Ryan asks. “Done being a chef?” 

 

“Nothing I cook ever tastes right,” Shane pouts, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down at his socked feet standing on the clean tile. “It’s cause you don’t have fresh ingredients!”

 

“I doubt having a garden would make those brownies any less of a disaster,” Ryan scoffs, leaning down to grab his water bottle. He unscrews the cap, holding the bottle up in preparation for some big chugs. Before he can partake, however, he says “I don’t exactly know how you expect me to build a garden underground.” 

 

Shane shifts on his feet, pouting further, looking around the room to childishly avoid eye contact with Ryan. 

 

“What do you want me to do about it?” Ryan finally sighs. 

 

“I want to go  _ outside _ ,” Shane throws his arms out, finally looking at Ryan. “I want to go  _ do  _ something!” 

 

“Like  _ what _ ?” Ryan asks incredulously. He can’t believe that Shane is stupid enough to want to leave the safety of their little haven to willingly throw themselves at flesh eating zombies. 

 

Shane points up to his face and blinks at Ryan expectantly, just assuming the other man will understand what he means. When he gets a blank response from Ryan, he says “I need my glasses! I never went back to get my stuff. I need my glasses, and I wanna stop wearing your weird hobbit clothes.” 

 

“They’re not hobbit clothes,” Ryan is quick to defend himself. “They’re just not giant cyclops clothes.” 

 

Shane rolls his eyes and scoffs, throwing his hands up. “I drank a lot of milk as a kid, okay? So  _ what _ ! Is that a crime? So sue me!” 

 

Ryan shrugs and waves an imaginary flag to surrender, smirking at Shane as he watches the big one get worked up over the smallest things. Ryan swings his leg over the workout bench, standing up and stretching out some of his muscles to prevent tearing one. 

 

“Your side heal up?” Ryan asks, stretching his arm to the side, feeling soreness already burn between his shoulder blades. 

 

Shane gingerly touches his ribs, feeling sheepish and embarrassed. They’re mostly healed, just sensitive scabs at this point, but Ryan has been pushing him to clean his bandages each morning with precision. He says, “Yeah, I’m doin’ okay.”

 

“Okay. We can go,” he sighs. 

 

“Really?” Shane looks at him eagerly, excitement coursing through his body. When Shane’s excited, he kind of resembles a cartoon volcano on the verge of erupting. His tall figure shakes and vibrates, threatening to burst at any second. 

 

“Yeah,” Ryan nods, lifting his dark puppy eyes up at Shane in reluctancy. “Go get ready, you big idiot. I’ll take you out.”

 

“To protect me?” Shane smiles wide, his eyebrows wiggling suggestively. He doesn’t mean anything by it, but he is still a little hopeful for what Ryan’s answer will be. 

 

“Sure,” Ryan scoffs, a smirk on his face. “Since you clearly can’t protect yourself.” 

 

Shane doesn’t take offense to this stab of an insult, just simple backs out of the room with his hands up near his face. “Alright, alright. No need to get hostile, now! I’ll be ready in about ten, is that okay?” 

 

Ryan shrugs, taking another big chug from his water bottle as he shoos Shane away with his free hand. The action is so dismissive and passive that Shane takes a step back, feeling foolishly clowned like a little brother who was just told to shut up. 

 

So, Shane heads out to the living room, finding the clothes that he showed up to Ryan’s door in. They’re a bit dirty, but otherwise will do the job. He’s just tired of wearing crop tops. 

 

Ryan comes out sometime later, dressed in an olive green shirt and black pants. He’s got his combat boots on, and Shane watches as he attaches the gun holster to his belt loop, a pistol cozily tucked inside. A heavy backpack is strapped to him, a buckle coming from the straps to connect right in the center of Ryan’s chest. 

 

“No axe?” Shane says sadly. 

 

“Not today big guy,” Ryan shakes his head, then glances up at Shane. “You know how to shoot a gun?”

 

“Not at all,” Shane remarks. 

 

Ryan smiles at this, finding the tall, goofy man to be an absolute moron, yet still lovable. He’s glad that he doesn’t hate Shane, it would be quite uncomfortable if there were some insufferable bastard locked into this bunker with him. 

 

“I’ll teach you, don’t worry,” Ryan smiles as he looks downwards to clip the holster, moving it just slightly to ensure it’s stability. Once appeased, he looks up to Shane and asks “You ready?” 

 

Shane places a pair of imaginary sunglasses over his eyes, crossing his slender arms over his chest. “Born ready.”

 

Ryan shakes his head, heading over to the vault door. “You’re an idiot.”

 

“But you’re laughing!” Shane follows Ryan into the chamber, jumping at the loud thud of the vault door behind him. He watches Ryan meticulously unlock each bolt on the door, the man’s hands crafted from the same marble that the Greek used. 

 

“Yeah, I guess,” Ryan says. Even with his face to the door, Shane can tell he’s smiling. “But that’s just because you’re an idiot.”

 

“Oh ho! Such big words for such a tiny man!” Shane has to fight back no matter what the situation is, he was born to argue. And argue he shall. 

 

“Shut up,” Ryan holds a hand up, the door ajar just slightly. Shane quiets down, hunching down in fear. He knows by now that if Ryan tells him to be quiet, he should probably listen. No arguing this time. 

 

Ryan slowly pulls the door open, Shane breathing down his neck curiously to see what Ryan’s being so suspicious for. As soon as the door is open far enough for their heads to poke out, Ryan is reaching down with one hand and holding his other arm out to spread across Shane’s chest. 

 

Before Shane can even process the situation, two bullets have left the chamber of Ryan’s gun. Shane reaches up to cover his ears, pressing closer to Ryan’s back as another shot fires. 

 

There’s a silence, and then Ryan’s arms slowly lower, his shoulders relaxing with ease. Ryan looks back to Shane, his hardened expression enough to scare anybody. 

 

“You okay?” Ryan asks. He scans the man’s face for any sight of an injury, but Shane only appears to be shaken. Nothing more. 

 

“Yeah,” Shane lowers his hands sheepishly. “Just… Loud.”

 

“Yeah,” Ryan laughs, the danger in the atmosphere dissipating. “You get used to it. I’m sure I can find some earplugs for you when I take you out shooting.”

 

Shane’s attention isn’t held by Ryan’s kind words, no, it’s now focused on the flies buzzing above the hot, rancid corpses piled up on each other right outside the door. The corpses that followed Shane back to the bunker are decomposing into a grey sludge, the skin crawling with maggots and other bugs. There’s new corpses, however. The ones Ryan just put down. A massive, built, quarterback looking man with two oozing holes in its skull. Draped across the top of that one’s chest is a smaller, but mostly bone elderly person. The gender is unidentifiable, this one must have turned right during the outbreak. A chunk of rotting skin is poised tightly between its teeth, a centipede crawling from the nasal cavity. 

 

“Oh my god,” Shane covers his mouth, feeling queasy. He takes a lightheaded step back, just to feel Ryan’s strong hands balance him out. 

 

“Hey, take it easy,” Ryan states. He pats Shane’s shoulder in an attempt to calm down the tall wavering tree. The last thing he needs is this mess of a 6’4” man to collapse in his arms. “They’re gone, don’t worry.”

 

“But why-“ Shane shakes his head, unable to comprehend. “How’d those two find this place?” 

 

“Feeding,” Ryan kicks the hand of one of the corpses, the pointer finger detaching and rolling across the dirt floor. “They could smell the blood.”

 

“Corpses… eat other corpses?” Shane wonders outloud, his chest hammering as he steps over the pile of bodies with Ryan. 

 

“Corpses eat anything besides fruits,” Ryan explains. He takes the steps quickly, but Shane taking them two at a time still has him at the disadvantage. The two have a silent race, Shane smiling smugly when he reaches the top of the hidden staircase first. Ryan scoffs at him, but continues talking anyway. “Corpses that eat each other are more… feral. They’re erratic, you can usually pick them apart from a crowd. Never have I had a run-in with a cannibal that wasn’t fucking ballistic.” 

 

“Gross,” Shane states. There’s not much else to say other than that word, but Ryan just nods in agreement. 

 

“Stay close to me,” Ryan says. “If there was corpses out here, there could be more coming. You still got that knife?”

 

“Yeppers,” Shane pats his pants to indicate that it’s in his pocket. “I’m sure my knife will totally do as much damage as your gun.” 

 

“Just…” Ryan trails off, giving Shane an annoyed glare. That look reminds Shane that the two are just strangers, and Ryan keeps pushing him out any time they start to get close. Ryan is too guarded, and Shane doesn’t know how many times he can handle being locked out. “Stay close. It’s all you have to do.” 

 

Shane wants to argue, he wants to make a sarcastic comment, but Ryan’s stare tells him that this isn’t the time. They’re above ground now, they can’t afford to get caught having a laugh. Ryan is on high alert, now having to worry for two people instead of one. Shane’s not necessarily  _ stupid _ , he doesn’t give off the sense of an airhead. He’s just… clueless. Ryan knows that the massive moose of a man will end up getting himself killed if Ryan doesn’t look out for him. 

 

Not that Ryan minds. He misses having someone to protect. 

 

Ryan shakes his head, ridding his head from those thoughts. He focuses on getting into city, his hand hovering by his waist uneasily, nervous little eyes sweeping every entry point they could be attacked from. When he glances up at Shane, the tall man is walking with his eyes pointed upwards, his gaze fixated on the clouds floating through the blue sky. This is why Ryan has to protect him. To Ryan, they’re risking their life and just heading straight towards the face of danger. To Shane, it’s just a lovely stroll. 

 

Once they’re inside town, Ryan nudges Shane to get the man’s attention. Shane looks down curiously, and Ryan’s hand gestures out towards their surroundings. 

 

“You lead the way from here, big guy.” 

 

So Shane does, providing lovely commentary about their decimated environment as they walk. He acts like a prestige tour guide, but the environment doesn’t give him much to work with, so Shane has to improvise. Something he’s good at. 

 

“And here, to your left, you’ll see the barren wasteland of a McDonald’s! Ah, yes, those sexy Golden Arches. Legend has it that the uneaten burgers left inside hasn’t molded at all! Pop one of those suckers in the microwave and it’s good as new! Not fresh, but let’s be real. When has Mickey D’s ever been truly fresh?” 

 

Ryan laughs at the tall man’s absurdity, but he doesn’t let his guard drop. They’re on a bad side of town, and each bag that blows past in the wind, or dumpster echoing with the sounds of a raccoon rummaging all send Ryan into heaps of anxiety. 

 

“Here she is!” Shane exclaims out of nowhere. They’re in the parking lot of a college university, the building still looking fairly well considering the apocalypse hit their town as hard as it did. Ryan nods, inspecting the architect of the clearly prestige college, impressed by Shane’s survival instincts. 

 

“Not bad,” Ryan says. “Good idea. How’s it feel having an entire university to yourself?” 

 

“No, no,” Shane shakes his head, chuckling. “Ryan, you fool. The college isn’t my place, this beaut is.”

 

Ryan looks over in confusion, watching as Shane lifts the hatch on a U-HAUL truck and raises the back to reveal a fairly furnished inside. Shane hops in with ease, turning around to smile proudly at Ryan. 

 

“Welcome to casa a la Madej!” 

 

“That’s not-“ Ryan tries to correct his Spanish, but shakes his head in defeat. “Are you serious, man? You have this beautiful ass university right next to you, and you’re sleeping in a  _ truck _ ?” 

 

“Yeah,” Shane nods, “What’s wrong with that? It’s safe. Zombies can get in through windows and stuff. But this baby? She’s immortal.” 

 

Shane slaps the side of the metal inside, the sound echoing through the chamber. He looks around at his desk, stacked with unorganized comic books and ridiculous novels. There’s a mattress on the floor, covered in various blankets. Besides that, an unfinished puzzle and a tapedeck with cassettes stacked next to it. There’s a pile of folded clothes pushed into the corner, weighed down with bags of chips and other various foods. Ryan examines all of this with raised eyebrows, genuinely amazed at how content Shane is with his coffin of a home. 

 

“So, what, you just wanna drive this thing back home?” Ryan asks, gesturing towards the contraption. 

 

“Oh, no,” Shane laughs as if it’s obvious. He doesn’t miss the way Ryan says  _ home _ , as if Shane’s been welcomed into the bunker family. “This baby’s got no engine. Completely useless!” 

 

“Greeeat,” Ryan lifts his leg onto the step, but Shane reaches down to haul him up by the arm. Ryan is surprised by the contact, his skin raising with goosebumps the second someone else’s hands are on him. He steps backwards, almost bordering on the verge of falling out of the truck. Shane blinks at him, while Ryan quickly straightens his shirt out and excessively breathes.   

 

It’s not that he doesn’t want to be touched, he just wasn’t expecting it. He forgot how it felt to be tending Shane’s wounds, the little electric shocks that would zap him each time he reached out to brush against Shane’s ghostly skin. He forgot how it felt to have someone grab him, and he forgot how it felt to not want that person to let go. 

 

“Wh-Where should we start?” Ryan asks, looking around the room anxiously. He feels itchy with discomfort, wishing for nothing more than a distraction at this point. 

 

Shane glances at his living quarters, not quite feeling at home anymore. It’s strange, he would spend days in here at a time. Only leaving his sanctuary to go piss in the bushes, but still, he would come back to his cave and swore he belonged nowhere else. But then… 

 

Shane glances at Ryan, who is flipping through the comic books with piqued interests. This trailer isn’t his home anymore… the bunker is. 

 

Shane doesn’t realize it quite yet, but it’s not the bunker that he’s tied to. 

 

“Don’t worry, I got it,” Shane shrugs, “Why don’t you stand and keep watch?” 

 

“I thought you said this is a safe zone?” Ryan inquires, lifting his gaze to where Shane’s now gathering the clothes. There’s a plastic tote bag that Shane grabs at, and Ryan quietly shrugs the backpack off his shoulders and hands it over to the taller man. Shane smiles gratefully, but Ryan looks away before he can get a proper thank you. 

 

“It is,” Shane responds, “But I want you to feel like you’re doing something important, so.” 

 

Ryan scoffs but stands towards the edge of the trailer anyway, leaning against the metal wall that heats up rapidly beneath the blistering sun. 

 

Ryan watches intently, his eyes fixated on the tree line parallel to the school building. He sweats beneath the spotlight he’s stuck in, alert as a guard dog. Every once in awhile, he will glance back at Shane when a strange noise echoes through the chamber, but it’s usually the man dropping a book or tripping over one of his many blankets. 

 

After an eternity that is truly just fifteen minutes, Shane says “Okay! Ready to rumble. Did you, uh, need this? They were in your bag.” 

 

Ryan turns around to see a stack of three clips in Shane’s hand, the pistol magazines looking tiny in comparison to his freakish fingers. Ryan looks upwards, but he’s taken back by the glasses now adorning Shane’s face. The man looks at him simply, unbothered by the frames resting on the bridge of his nose. Instead, he holds the ammo out towards Ryan a bit more urgently. 

 

“Right,” Ryan nods, taking the pistol from his side. He checks how many rounds are left, then slides it back into his holster smoothly. 

 

“I can stuff it in my pockets,” Shane says, followed by “But then I won’t be able to get to my knife…”

 

Ryan laughs, “Why don’t you put that plastic bag to good use, buddy?” 

 

Shane looks down at their feet, seeing the bag in question that he originally tried to use. He nods in agreement, dumping the ammo into the second bag and tying it around his wrist. Once his hands are free, he lugs the book bag over his shoulders and scoops the comics off of his desk. Ryan’s library is too philosophical, he misses having bright pictures to look at. Shane is a simple man. 

 

Once Ryan double checks that Shane has everything he needs, the two start their journey back through town. It’s more dangerous this time, the sun is higher in the sky which results in more corpses coming out of the woodwork to threaten the two. Each time there’s a clatter, followed by limping footsteps, Ryan has a bullet between the rotting eyes before the corpse can even reach an arm’s length away. 

 

Shane jumps each time. His hands grip the straps of the backpack tightly, his legs stiff and heavy with fear. Still, he walks behind Ryan, watching the way that the smaller one is attracted to any slight noise around them. Whether it’s just a board falling over or a cat walking across a glass bottle, his forearms flex a little as his grip tightens on the gun. He has it pointed downwards to avoid any accidental misfire that could potentially ricochet and kill him or Shane, but each time that a corpse comes clambering towards them, the gun is up in a second and a bullet is leaving the chamber twice as fast. Each shot feels like Shane’s heart is going to jump right out of his skin. His shoulders furrow, his grip tightens, and his lead-like legs make him walk a little closer to Ryan. 

 

While Ryan stands and loads a new clip into his gun, Shane feels himself sway backwards as an unknown force pulls on him. His tall figure and lack of balance causes him to stumble, the tall tower crumbling right down into the arms of a twitchy flesh bag. 

 

“Ryan,” Shane instantly calls out, his heart hammering as he struggles against the arms wrapping around his core. He can’t see what it is, or how dead it is, but he can smell the rot and feel the hot breath engulfing his exposed neck. Shane’s lungs shrink in fear, the large man opening his mouth to pant as fast as he can, his throat drying out within seconds. “Ryan, Ryan, Ry- Ah!”

 

Shane feels the sharp pinch dig into his skin, the curve of his shoulder swelling up in pain. He feels all of the blood in his body rush to this spot, the searing agony throbbing against his pulse. The elasticity in his skin makes it difficult for the corpse to rip it right off of his body, but the sinking feeling of teeth inside your shoulder is downright horrifying. 

 

Shane looks up in a blind panic, seeing Ryan standing right over him with the gun pointed against his head. The fear only multiplies, now taking over the rest of his body as he tries to violently thrash free from the bones capturing him. 

 

“Stop moving,” Ryan says calmly, his hands steady. He closes one eye, looking down the barrel to improve his shot.

 

Despite his calm demeanor, it has no effect on Shane. The tall man continues to freak out, too terrified to make any sounds at all, just moving in such a way that would look like convulsions to the naked eye. 

 

The zombie attaching itself to the man’s back opens its ugly mouth once more, rearing its exposed skull back to prepare for another chunk of Madej meat. As soon as Ryan sees his opening, he shoots a whizzing bullet right into the decaying throat hole exposed by the creature’s own hunger. As if choking on the bullet, it falls back onto the ground beneath it, the grip on Shane loosening instantaneously. The tall man holds his ear that was nearly grazed by the bullet, his long legs kicking up dirt as he scurries backwards. Ryan unleashed a solid six more bullets into the clearly limp body, and after such a show, Shane looks up to see the man’s expression completely void of emotion. Absolute apathy. 

 

The stone expression wipes clean off his face the second he looks over and sees Shane still cowering on the ground, the hardened eyes now softening up as they flood with worry and concern. Ryan kneels beside Shane, bringing his hand up to Shane’s jaw just so he can navigate the big man’s head aside to inspect the wound gaping in his neck. 

 

“Am I going to die?!” Shane asks, his voice frantic. He doesn’t even care how pathetic he is, he is terrified and hysteric. “Am I going to become a fucking zombie now?”

 

“No,” Ryan says shortly, his eyebrows scrunched together as he gently presses his forefinger into the wound. Shane let’s out a yelp of anguish, instinctually moving away from Ryan’s hands. This makes the smaller one snap out of doctor mode, his voice returning to the soft comfort Shane needs to calm down. “That’s not how the disease is transmitted. Or at least not that I’ve seen. You’ll be okay, the only way you would turn is if the bite killed you. As long as you’re still up and running, you’ll keep being human and shit.” 

 

Shane exhales physically, his whole body relaxing. He doesn’t even seem to mind that some of the chunky brain matter that Ryan blew out is coating the side of his legs. Ryan stands up straight, offering a hand out to Shane, and that gesture alone is more comforting than the multiple bullets unloaded into the corpse. 

 

“You okay to walk?” Ryan asks him, cautiously holding his hands out as Shane steps forward to collect the bag that was thrown off his shoulders. 

 

“I got a chunk of my shoulder taken out, dude, I’m not missing a leg.” 

 

Shane feels the need to protect himself after such a weak display. He is threatened by Ryan’s strength, and he wishes to be as strong as the little man is. He hates that he’s been the one to get attacked time and time again, though he knows his height makes him an easy target. He just wishes he was better at defending himself so that the new man he’s living with doesn’t see him as a helpless, pathetic baby. 

 

When they get back to the desert, Ryan holds the door open for Shane to enter the bunker. When the tall man steps over the myriad of bodies, he glances back at the way Ryan doesn’t enter behind him. 

 

“Are you coming?” Shane asks, turning his whole body to avoid straining his exposed flesh. Ryan holds the door open just slightly, his attention more focused on the growing pile of death. 

 

“The passcode is 8-6-5-9-3. Go ahead, I’m gonna try and clear these bodies away so we don’t attract more corpses,” Ryan says distractedly. “Settle your things in, but be careful. If you get the first aid kit out, I’ll tend to you when I come in.” 

 

“Do you… need any help?” Shane asks uneasily, nervous and afraid. He glances at the corpses, terrified of one of them dragging him down again. A gust of wind rolls down the staircase, stinging against the wound. 

 

Ryan senses Shane’s distress, so he quickly shakes his head. Shane’s had enough scares today, he deserves a break. Waving his hand, he says “No worries. I got this.” 

 

So, Shane goes inside as Ryan begins to lift the first corpse over his shoulder. He doesn’t exactly know  _ where  _ to unpack, so he leaves the bookbag by the couch and simply stacks his comic books next to Ryan’s coffee table books. It’s nice to have his glasses back, he can finally  _ see  _ instead of squinting at everything. 

 

The first aid kit is still in the bathroom where Ryan says it’s supposed to live, so Shane drags it out to the living room and sits patiently on the couch, his body shifting around just slightly. He worries about bleeding on Ryan’s couch, but most of the blood has congealed and stiffened anyway. Shane knows this is going to be a bitch of a wound to clean, but somehow Ryan is really good at making it hurt less. Maybe he’s got magic fingers, maybe he’s got  _ The Touch.  _

 

When Ryan comes back in, he gives Shane a curt nod and immediately heads straight for the bathroom. He was a blur of colors as he walked by, but the smell of rotting flesh did not hesitate to linger. Shane listens to the running water floating down the hall, then sits up straight when the water stops. He guesses Ryan just needed to get the death off his hands, but Shane doesn’t blame him. Those corpses that have been melting out in the heat for the past week couldn’t have been easy to move, nor pleasant. 

 

Ryan re-emerges, looking a little flustered by the way he bolted past Shane. He wipes his wet palms on the fabric of his jeans, walking around to the side to take his seat on the couch cushion next to Shane’s. The couch dips as he sits, causing Shane to slope towards the middle just slightly. The two look into each other’s eyes, quiet and speechless, before Ryan breaks contact to open the first aid kit. 

 

“It doesn’t go deep, it looks like just a surface tear. Do you mind unbuttoning your shirt a little so I can get closer to it?” Ryan asks, retrieving cotton balls. 

 

“Um,” Shane thinks about the intimacy of the situation “Ok?” 

 

His nervous fingers fumble with the top three buttons, the man trying to look anywhere except for Ryan’s awkward face. Isn’t this uncomfortable? Why the hell is it so weird? Shane never imagined partially stripping in front of a random stranger, but then again he never really thought that he wouldn’t want to stop, either. 

 

“Alright, come and patch me up, Doctor Bergara,” Shane tries to alleviate some of the tension in his air, pushing the collar of his shirt away from the curve of his neck. He feels his fingertips dip into a spot of blood pooling in his collarbone, but he’s more concerned by the flustered look on Ryan’s face. Apparently, that joke did not help the situation. 

 

“I mean, I’ll try to,” Ryan says uneasily, reaching out to gently put his hand on Shane’s shoulder. At first, Shane thinks it’s merely a comfort, but then Ryan pinches the skin on his shoulder and Shane feels the sting of rubbing alcohol followed immediately after. 

 

“Oh, great,” Shane scoffs, but his eyes twinkle mischievously. “I’m going to die down here from malpractice.” 

 

“Wouldn’t be the first time this bunker’s seen death,” Ryan laughs, an obvious joke. 

 

But… there’s a hint of truth to it, a little bit of despair lacing the man’s tongue that those words happen to fall from. Shane looks down, wondering what the hell is going on in that little head of Ryan’s. He looks so concentrated on fixing Shane’s bite mark, his eyebrows furrowed and bottom lip sucked into his mouth. 

 

It’s not a massive step, but it’s still a tiny entryway. Shane feels as if he is slowly breaking down all the concrete that Ryan’s encased himself in, and this tidbit of morbid information feels like he just got a whole lot closer to finding that doorknob. 


	5. Chapter 5

Shane stands in the kitchen, placing a fake garnish on the plate with precision. He's proud of this dish, it turned out almost as good as the pie he baked last week. 

 

Shane carefully balances the two plates on one arm, reaching above the fridge to fetch a bottle of wine from the cabinet. 

 

Ryan likes white wines, which was quite a surprise when Shane found out. There’s a bottle of red that Shane has been told he can have, but he’d rather match with whatever it is that Ryan’s drinking that night. 

 

Shane sets the two plates on the table, one at the far end, the other to the immediate left. Shane tried sitting at the other head of the table, but after a few meals together he decided they felt too much like a vampire family and moved to occupy the seat to Ryan’s left. 

 

Ryan’s been busy all day. It’s not uncommon for him to disappear past the pantry and work on “expanding,” but that’s not where he is today. He entered the storage room a little after breakfast, and he has yet to rear his head for anything other than a bathroom break sometime in the late afternoon. Shane doesn’t want to bother him, for when the small one emerged from the bedroom, Shane was coming from the library and the two accidentally crossed paths. Ryan’s alarmed eyes were rubbed red and looked misty, so Shane left him alone to deal with whatever memories were inside that room. 

 

Now, Shane shifts around on his feet uneasily, standing in front of the aforementioned bedroom a little apprehensively. He can hear things being shifted around inside, the faint sounds of Ryan grunting on the other side of the wall. After much consideration, he raises the courage to lift a hand and gently rap against the smooth wood with the back of his knuckles. 

 

There’s a pause, and then the door opens just slightly, Ryan filling the little gap that he creates. 

 

“Hey!” Shane tries to say in an uplifting manner. “Dinner’s done. Wanna take a break?”

 

“I’m almost done-“ Ryan shakes his head, moving to shut the door on Shane.

 

Shane Madej may be one of the most stubborn people on this earth. He sticks his foot in the doorway, his elbow extending out to catch the door. He tries again, giving Ryan a warm smile as he lifts the wine bottle in his free hand. “I’ve got alcohol.”

 

And like any man in his late twenties, that lures Ryan out fairly well. The door remains shut behind him, but Shane doesn’t try to barge in like he did on his first tour. If he’s learned anything about the well-prepared man whilst living under this roof with him, it’s that if Ryan wants him to know something, then he’ll let Shane know. There’s no point in pushing anything out of him, it’s like pulling teeth on a kid who’s got his jaw wired shut. 

 

“What’d you make tonight?” Ryan asks as the two begin to travel down the hall, entering the living room side by side. He takes the bottle of wine out of Shane’s hand, wiggling the cork out as slowly as he can. 

 

“I put that pork to use,” Shane says, trying to figure out how to word it without sounding like a cooking channel infomercial. “It’s, uh, pork tenderloin… nice and juicy, y’know. Real meaty. Then I salted and seasoned some sweet potatoes with garlic salt, black pepper, and a pinch of paprika. Drizzled them bad boys with some olive oil, lil shower for the potato boys, then just tossed some canned asparagus in a pan and called it a day. Simple.”

 

“Sounds fucking amazing,” Ryan says, successfully getting the cork out and tipping the bottle back to drink straight from the mouth. Once he pulls away, he offers some of the wine to Shane, but Shane shakes his head. 

 

Something about their lips touching so indirectly yet so closely makes him feel a bit too queasy for his liking. 

 

“Yeah, well, would taste better if they were… y’know…  _ fresh _ ,” Shane mutters under his breath, an ongoing complaint between the two. 

 

Ryan rolls his eyes, shaking his head as he sits down at the table. He pours half a glass into the stemware that Shane set out, then reaches over to pour some in Shane’s matching glass. He pours a little bit less, looking to Shane for permission, then topping him off when the bigger guy nods. 

 

“We can always go up above and look for some natural organic store-“ Ryan suggests, his smile growing with each word he speaks. Nothing he said is inherently funny, but it’s the words he hears next that makes him crack a grin. 

 

“For god’s sake, Ryan, I’m not going back up there! Do you not remember the  _ chunk _ that was taken out of my shoulder?!” Shane huffs childishly, smacking his fork against the plate to create a racket. 

 

Ryan smiles, warmly, and he begins picking at the food set in front of him. “Wow. This is really good, man. You’re getting a lot better.” 

 

“Oh,” Shane calms, his face flushing under the compliments. “Am I?” 

 

“Yeah, I mean it. This is good stuff. I’m not even worried about you poisoning it,” Ryan chuckles, wiping at the corners of his mouth. 

 

Shane smiles back, and the two eat their meal in a relatively comfortable silence. When you’re the only two left on earth, you run out of things to talk about pretty fast. That doesn’t really bother them, however. Neither of the two mind the silence, it’s just natural for them. 

 

“Happy three months, by the way,” Ryan says after Shane nearly falls victim to the trainwreck that is his thoughts about Tom Cruise. 

 

“What’s that?” Shane looks up, fixing his crooked glasses. 

 

“You’ve been here for three months,” Ryan says slowly, looking across the table as if he’s unsure of the timeline. “Isn’t that why you made such a nice meal? To celebrate?”

 

Shane glances downwards. This is considered a nice meal? Well, it is a bit extravagant in comparison to their usual sandwiches for dinner. And the wine is a bit much. The dimmed lighting certainly doesn’t help. Shane didn’t even realize he was setting things up this way, and embarrassment creeps up his spine as he realizes what his intentions were. 

 

You see, it’s kind of difficult to live with someone when you’ve got an increasing amount of thoughts about just how cute they are when they first wake up. Even worse when you see the way they look when they come out of the shower. Shane’s bordering on the verge of a dangerous line, and Ryan’s morning voice might be the thing to push him over the edge. He’s been trying very hard to suppress every internal compliment he yearns to blurt out, instead living an earnest life as a normal roommate. Nothing weird about Shane, no sir. 

 

_ Was I trying to take him on a fucking date? _

 

The idea alone is ridiculous. Shane isn’t even interested in men, let alone the annoying one sitting next to him. There have been countless upon countless nights of Ryan sitting out in the living room for abhorrent amounts of times talking about the solidarity of ghosts and aliens and everything make believe. Or maybe it’s the fact that after he works out, he’ll come into the kitchen to make a protein shake with the blender on quite literally the loudest setting, waking Shane up every morning without fail. On top of that, he’s a sports fans. He has tapes of old games that he listens to on his old boom box radio, and Shane has to tune out each whoop and holler that Ryan belts out as if he hasn’t heard this exact baseball game before. Ryan’s truly annoying, but… 

 

Shane thinks that’s what he likes about him. 

 

“Just thought I’d cook,” Shane shrugs, “Gives me something to do down here. You’re kinda boring, Bergara.” 

 

“Hey now, watch it,” Ryan points his wineglass at Shane before taking a sip. His next threat is an empty one, but still worth saying. “You better drop the attitude before I throw you out to the ghouls.” 

 

Shane smiles, shaking his head at the absurdity of such things. But, changing the subject, he avoids getting caught in the topic of ghouls all together by looping back around to their original topic. 

 

“Cooking’s a good skill, I’m glad I’m finally getting able to dabble in it. Before the outbreak I never really had a reason to cook, my girlfriend always cooked for the two of us.”

 

He’s gotten comfortable enough to talk of her freely without feeling as much guilt. He’s still afraid to say her name. For what? He’s not sure. All he knows is that he  _ definitely  _ cannot explain her demise, he doesn’t want Ryan to look at him any differently. So, for now, all he does is refer to her as  _ the girlfriend _ even though it feels dehumanizing each and every time. She was more than just his girlfriend, she was a wonderfully unique nutcase of a woman and Shane wants to bite his tongue any time he refers to her as anything other than her god given name. 

 

That’s another barrier he refuses to cross. Not only is he not interested in men, but he refuses to be disloyal to Sara. She was the most faithful companion that he’s ever been with, all history of past girlfriends paling in comparison to her radiance. She was truly everything, his reason for simply being. So while his head does rush with a quick amount of thoughts each time Ryan wrestles him for the remote, he simply writes it off as being touch starved and sensory deprivation craving to have some human contact after months of him being away from Sara. 

 

Ryan looks at Shane wistfully, the face of someone who feels sympathy. Shane hates that face, so he busies himself with downing the glass of wine set in front of him. He doesn’t want  _ nor  _ need Ryan to feel bad for him. Okay, yeah, his girlfriend died. So  _ what _ ? It’s not as if Shane needs to be babied every time it’s brought up. 

 

“I’m sure she was a lovely cook,” Ryan says quietly, as if he is tiptoeing through sewage rivers of trepidation. “But you’re getting there too.”

 

“Yeah?” Shane asks, pushing his food around on his plate. He’s suddenly not hungry. “Maybe I’ll try baking something for dessert. We’ll see how drunk I am.” 

 

“Is that a competition, Madej?” Ryan grabs the neck of the bottle, squinting his deep forest brown eyes at Shane.

 

The taller man smirks, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. That alone is enough of a challenge for Ryan to slam it back, taking wide gulps that distract Shane by the bobbing Adam’s apple. 

 

_ God damn it, go away, gay thoughts! Be gone! Be gone with your sinful lures!  _

 

Ryan pulls away, his face twisting up as he sticks his tongue out to express his distaste for the bitter afterkick of wine. He holds the bottle out, and Shane pretends like he doesn’t feel their fingertips brush together as he takes the bottle from Ryan’s hands. 

 

Shane finishes off the rest of the bottle all on his own. Shane went to a college in bum hick Illinois, a town so small that there wasn’t much else to do but get drunk in a cornfield and call it a night. On many occasions, drinking games would ensue, and he is just a tad shy of a competitive man. So, Shane learned to chug. He’s quite good at it as well, he doesn’t stop to catch his breath at all while taking each swallow. 

 

“Fucks sake, man,” Ryan exclaims when Shane sets the empty wine bottle back on the table. “Slow it down, man. There’s no doctors around to give you a stomach pump if your liver shuts down.” 

 

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Shane laughs, “Dr. Bergara is in the building!”

 

Still, even so, Ryan gives him that uneasy look. “Make sure you drink some water before bed. I'll start a pot of coffee, but I’ve gotta get back to the room.”

 

“Ryan, come  _ ooon _ ,” Shane whines in the little needy way that he does whenever he wants something. It’s not hard to get Ryan to cave, the younger man always seems to smile and give in as soon as Shane pleads with that clingy voice of his. Shane knows this, and he uses it to his full advantage. “I haven’t seen you all day, man. I’m bored. I feel like I’m going crazy in this tin box.”

 

“Are you complaining about the extravagant bunker I’ve provided you with? Would you rather me have built a cylindrical room with a bucket in the corner for pissing in?” Ryan lifts his eyebrows.

 

“No, I’m just…” Shane sighs, throwing his limbs down. He’s starting to feel a bit of a hum creeping up the back of his neck. Not quite a buzz, just a mere hum. “It’s just boring, dude.”

 

“Shut up, I’m doing all this for you,” Ryan stands up, a scoff evident in his tone. Not angry, but annoyed in that Bergara Hates Madej sort of dynamic that they have. 

 

With that said, Shane doesn’t say another word. He quietly just trails Ryan into the kitchen, starting to clean up the mess he made from dinner as Ryan brews coffee. Another lull of silence graces over them, a delicate silence that the two enjoy like silk sheets on bare skin. Ryan pours a mug, then heads out. He doesn’t say anything else to Shane, just leaves Shane in the cold winter that he’s been stuck in for three months apparently. 

 

Shane leans against the counter, reaching up to trace his fingers along the collar of his shirt. His fingertips dip beneath the fabric, running along the scarred skin there. It’s a different texture from the rest of his shoulder, the skin charred and rough around the edges. It feels like a whole different person, someone new. Shane thinks that he  _ is  _ becoming someone new, or at least… healing. Sara left a wound inside him, and maybe he’s finally healing. He doesn’t think Ryan is necessarily the cure for that, but maybe Ryan is just the bandaid to go over the wound for the time being. 

 

_ What a terrible life,  _ Shane thinks.  _ To have to live knowing I will never get another chance at affection, or romance… to never get another shot at love.  _

 

_ Is it a life worth living?  _

 

Shane knows he is merely a hopeless romantic, so he brushes the thoughts aside and finishes washing the dishes. Ryan’s explained to him that they have a water pump that’s connected directly to the city plant, and that he’s installed two different purifiers. Ryan majored in film studies and investigative journalism, but he minored in engineering and architecture to get some “easy credits.” Shane’s not sure what kind of child prodigy considers engineering to be “easy,” but it resulted in this fully functioning home that Ryan has been working on for years. Even now, nearly a year into the outbreak, he is still busy with whatever it is that he’s doing in the storage room that Shane is forbidden to enter. 

 

Shane tries to pass the time by reading some of his comics, but he’s read them all before. Instead, he sits and watches the lightbulbs glow and change colors as the sun begins to set, creating an orange atmosphere in the artificial environment. It’s quite a sad simulation, but after chugging half a bottle of wine, Shane finds that it’s enough to satisfy him. 

 

He curls up on the couch, sleepy with drunken haze, the cushions conforming to his body the way they do every night when he sleeps on them. His dreams are vivid, the way that they always are whenever he enters a wine coma. Vodka makes him forget, but wine trudges up the past. Like his shoulder scar is being dug into, blood gushing from the wound… the same way blood squirted from her face in spurts. 

 

Shane is transported there, the memory blurry around the edges and quite foggy behind his eyes. He can’t control his limbs, so no matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop grabbing her hair. He knows what happens next, and it’s inevitable. He is destined to follow this muscle memory in every nightmare to curse him for the rest of time. He is stuck in a loop of her death over and over again, the sound of the porcelain sink cracking and crumbling only echoing throughout his dreamstate. 

 

A hand touches his shoulder, a voice that is foreign to this scene entering Shane’s ears. This voice says “Hey, big guy.”

 

Shane blinks his eyes open, desperate to be relieved of the haunting echo of a memory that he was stuck in. He exhales, rolls over, and scrambles to find the glasses that slipped off of his face while he was dreaming. 

 

Ryan hovers above him, the smaller one backing away once he sees that Shane’s awake. Shane squints, confusion wracking his body and he drags himself out of exhaustion. 

 

“What’s up?” Shane tries to sound friendly. He’s not necessarily annoyed at Ryan for waking him, he just hopes that the other one has a damn good excuse for doing so. 

 

“Come on, I’ve got something to show you,” Ryan slips his hand into Shane’s his fingertips squeezing the man’s palm. The two look down at their conjoined hands at the same time, that inexplicable thumping of want and desire making its way back into Shane’s chest. He wants to feel more than just a hand, he wants to feel  _ human contact.  _

 

Ryan moves his hand away quickly, as if he’s embarrassed for making such a mistake. He looks away as he composes himself, collecting his composure as his nostrils flare with uneven breaths. Shane continues to stare at his hand, trying to forget the way that the tan hand fit so daintily into his. 

 

“Come on,” Ryan repeats, less softly this time. A more forceful, stern voice, one that seems to smack any of the remaining sleep out of Shane’s foggy brain. 

 

Shane follows Ryan down the hall, the two heading towards the storage room. The door is open, the light inside casting a soft glow down the dark hallway with its illumination. Ryan stops outside, staring into the room with wide, nervous eyes, then turns to look at Shane. 

 

“Here… you go,” Ryan mumbles, stepping aside to make an easier path inside. Shane fills that space, looking inside to see… a bedroom. 

 

An average bedroom. One that’s neat, lacking any of the posters that Ryan’s room has. Shane hasn’t gone in Ryan’s room much, but this room looks like a mirror copy of it, just… blank. A closet door hangs open, filled with clothes that Shane does not recognize. 

 

Ryan steps in quickly, shutting that door and pressing his back to it. His face looks a little pained, but still trying to be as open as he can. “I, uh, moved your clothes to the dresser. I hope you don’t mind. I would just prefer it if this closet stay closed.”

 

Everyone’s got skeletons in their closets, and Shane understands the irony of the metaphor better than anybody else that could be standing in his shoes instead. The tall one nods, slinking into the room to take a look around. There are outlines of things on top the dresser where dust has settled to create police chalk lines of the life that was once living in here, now emptied out for Shane to occupy. 

 

“Are you sure? I don’t mind sleeping on the couch,” Shane runs his finger along the desk, picking up dust on his fingertip. 

 

Ryan thinks for a moment, wondering if he  _ does  _ want to let someone in. Is it worth it? He’s been trying so hard to stay guarded ever since Shane’s arrived, he’s been telling himself to never,  _ ever  _ get attached, because he doesn’t want it to hurt when Shane leaves. But… Shane has stayed here for three months, opting to stay behind every time Ryan travels up to the surface for a supply run. Shane has been too traumatized by the bite in his shoulder to risk leaving again, so Ryan has come to the conclusion that… maybe it is safe. Maybe it will be okay if he allows Shane in. 

 

“Yeah,” Ryan says hesitantly, slowly approaching the topic. “If you’re going to stay here, you might as well have a proper room. I’m sure sleeping on the couch isn’t the most comfortable.” 

 

“It’s not too bad,” Shane lies. His body is in constant pain, the muscles cramping at any time they desire. He doesn’t tell Ryan this, because Ryan is a people pleaser who will try to accommodate to Shane’s aching body in a totally ridiculous way. “My legs don’t exactly fit, but, what can I do, y'know?” 

 

Ryan smiles that simple little Bergara smile, the trophy for all of Shane’s attempts at humor. It fades quickly, saying “I’m sure, dude. I washed the bed sheets for you and everything, and I’ll see about getting you a TV next time I run for batteries.” 

 

“No, that’s okay,” Shane says a little too quickly. He frowns, thinking of the TV in the living room and the little movie nights that him and Ryan have. They always pop popcorn, and Ryan always sits close enough so that they can share. Sometimes, their arms will touch, and on the rare occasion, their hands will bump into one another while they go to reach into the bowl at the same time. Ryan always makes a big awkward deal about apologizing for their run ins, but Shane doesn’t want to do anything that would disrupt those movie nights. “I like having a TV out in the living room. Fighting over the remote really makes me feel at home.” 

 

Ryan nods, carefully watching Shane look around the room. He’s nervous that Shane can somehow  _ feel  _ the occupant that used to live here before him, but in reality, Shane’s just testing the waters. 

 

Shane sits on the edge of the bed, bouncing a little on the soft mattress. It’s definitely more comfortable than the sofa, but he’s afraid that with the privacy of this new room, he won’t get to see sweaty, post workout, sleepy Ryan who insists on making his protein shakes at ungodly hours of the morning. 

 

“There’s a skylight,” Ryan says. He watches Shane with precision, trying to gauge the other man’s happiness. Ryan gets off on gratitude, and he’s waiting for Shane to give him that smile of approval that says he did a good thing. 

 

Shane leans back to stare upwards, looking fairly surprised as he sees the gaping hole in the ceiling. It’s protected by glass, a rectangular tunnel leading straight up towards the surface. It’s a bit far, but Shane can still see the stars littering the sky. They never looked this bright out in the city, it almost reminds Shane of the midwestern skies he would see while traveling on dirt country roads between cornfields. 

 

“Oh,” is what he says. He lies all the way back now, in love with the sight of the outside world. He wishes it weren’t at such a distance, but after three months of only knowing what time it is based off of the lightbulbs that change throughout the day, he finds solace in this tiny window that goes upwards. Shane doesn’t look away, he simply says “Come here. Come lay down.” 

 

There’s a moment of hesitation on Ryan’s part, mostly because the idea of laying down next to Shane seems far too intimate for his liking. He is trying  _ so  _ very hard to keep Shane locked out, to not let him sneak his way into Ryan’s heart, but it’s hard to say no to him. Ryan doesn’t know what it is, but anything Shane wants, he will try to give. 

 

So, he approaches the bed and slowly gets on, his knees dipping into the mattress and sinking down slightly, Shane’s body moving towards the sinkhole Ryan’s created. The window is small, so Ryan lies back and moves a little closer to Shane, just enough for their shoulders to touch. A warmth spreads through their torsos, the thin fabric of their shirts barely masking the heat they’re exchanging. 

 

Ryan doesn’t see the allure in stars that Shane does, they’re simply just stars to him. There’s no beauty in them, mostly because he’s too worried with things on earth to have time to admire the sky. But he supposes that’s what separates him and Shane, for Shane is a dreamer, a boy lost in daydreams and his own imagination, while Ryan is a prisoner to his own anxieties and worries. 

 

“It was my brother,” Ryan blurts out, then immediately squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t want the look of sympathy, he doesn’t need Shane to feel bad for him. The damage has already been done, the words already spoken. He can’t go back now, Shane’s picked the lock and now has one foot in the door. 

 

“What was that?” Shane asks, turning to look at Ryan. 

 

Ryan turns as well, seeing those warm brown eyes inches away from his. Shane’s got different eyes, they’re not as cold and dark as Ryan’s. They’re,,. They’re like hot soil, or chocolate fondue. Maybe those puppy eyes are the reason Ryan has a hard time saying no, even now, when he’s unable to stop himself from saying anymore. 

 

It wasn’t that hard for Shane to pick the lock if Ryan was on the other side slowly unlocking it for him. 

 

“My brother,” Ryan says quietly. “My family and I were all supposed to come down here if anything bad happened. My brother was the only one who I managed to… to save, I guess. He lived in this room.”

 

Shane listens intently, not breaking away from Ryan’s eyes as he nods. Shane hates making eye contact, but he knows that this is Ryan being vulnerable and he doesn’t want to miss this sight. 

 

“He loved waking up to sunshine,” Ryan goes on, a little smile lighting up his face. He looks happy to remember his brother, rather than how much it hurts to suppress the memory every day. “Such an asshole. He insisted I put windows in, didn’t care if it was underground or not.” 

 

Shane smiles as well, trying to imagine the smaller version of Ryan when this male is already tiny enough. Ryan looks back upwards towards the stars, searching desperately for any sort of beauty. He wants to see what Shane sees, he craves to see what his brother saw. 

 

Instead of trying to find the right words to say, Shane allows himself to act on impulse. Maybe it’s the wine making him act crazy, or maybe that’s what Shane will blame it on. Either way, he rolls over, propping himself up on his elbow so that he may lean down and burrow his face into Ryan’s shoulder, wrapping the male up in a hug. 

 

Ryan stiffens, his heart dropping as he feels himself being lifted off the mattress just slightly. Shane holds him up to his chest, pressing the side of his cheek against Ryan’s. It’s comfortable, and easy to get lost in. The kind of affection that he wants to drown in, to lose everything to. He tells himself he’s just touch starved, deprived of human contact and in need of being loved like all humans need, but there’s a lingering thought in the back of his head… one that whispers like a scream, with a voice like a prayer. 

 

Maybe it’s just Ryan. 

 

Shane exhales gently, closing his eyes and imagining their bodies being part of the stars. He doesn’t need a skylight in the ground to feel like a supernova, his veins lighting up like a 6 pm summer sunset. It feels safe, but most importantly…

 

It feels right. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: slight nsfw

With a bedroom now, Shane often oversleeps after spending a night in the library for hours, reading through his recent obsession. Ryan has an entire crime novel series, and the unsolved mysteries keep him distracted from the growing pit within his chest that can never quite be filled. 

 

Ryan’s back to expanding, and he’s been spending a lot of time gathering materials. Just the other day, Shane watched him carry gardening pots through the front vault door, but when Shane asked what they were for, Ryan merely shrugged. Many other things have come through the front door after Ryan is gone for a day or two to venture into the city so that he may gather. Some things such as tables, wall paneling, gallons of paint, and other various item. Shane’s eager to know what Ryan is building, excited to have something new to explore in their bunker. Each time Shane tries to enter the pantry, Ryan will appear as if he heard the clumsy one’s footsteps and push on the big one’s chest until Shane is standing back in the kitchen once again. 

 

So, he busies himself with the seemingly endless series of mystery novels, lying on the library floor with his nose between the pages. Every so often Ryan will come in, dropping off a blanket or bringing a cup of tea for Shane. Honestly, Ryan’s just happy that Shane’s finding ways to pass the time. He hates seeing the big goofball pace in boredom, so it’s nice to see him in one spot for longer than twenty minutes. 

 

Shane usually doesn’t wake up until the morning sun is hanging directly vertical of the ground, at such an angle that it shines down on Shane’s face. He stumbles across the hall every morning to shower and brush his teeth, and as he dries his hair with a towel, he heads out to the kitchen to pick up the mug of coffee that Ryan always pours out for him. 

 

Now, he stands in the kitchen, listening to the muffled whirling of a drill floating through the pantry. He wishes Ryan weren’t so busy all the damn time, he’d love to finally just…  _ talk  _ to him. All they ever do is watch movies with one another, or sit in silence. Shane is tired of the silence, he wants to explore Ryan’s little mind. 

 

Shane sets his coffee down, moving through the bunker to reach the other side. He turns down the L shaped hall, entering the octagonal end with the various doors situated on every wall. He notices the workout room door is hanging open, but it usually is. Out of all the rooms that Ryan has built, that one is the most frequently used. Ryan is hell bent on keeping his body in tact, but Shane doesn’t have the heart to tell him that there’s barely even a need to do so. Ryan has the type of metabolism that will keep him ripped even if he were to eat nothing but junk food all day long. 

 

Shane doesn’t enter the workout room, no, he enters the room parallel to it and side-steps the foosball table inside. He didn’t explore this side of the hall when Ryan gave his initial grand tour, but he knows their contents by now. This is the game room, with a foosball table starting the line of other tabletop games; pool, air hockey, and a row of skee-balls with ridiculously large high scores flashing on the screens. Shane isn’t in here to roll balls, however. He goes to the shelves lining the walls, picking out the game that he’s memorized the location of. He’s been waiting for a day of just true misery to bust it out, and the boredom has finally shifted over to nothing but dread. Shane doesn’t want to feel trapped, or trepidation. He doesn’t want to feel like a prisoner being kept alive out of spite. He wants to enjoy living with Ryan, even if he has to force the other one to enjoy it as well. 

 

Shane carries the board game in its box all the way back through the kitchen, pushing open the door to the pantry with his elbow. It’s a large room, stocked with various, various goods. Ryan has installed four deep freezers in the back corner, but that’s mostly where they keep their frozen meat until ready to thaw for whatever Shane’s cooking that night. Shane waits a few minutes, listens for the drilling to stop, then shakes the box in his arms to cause a racket with all the plastic pieces inside. 

 

As expected, Ryan appears from behind the plastic tarp separating whatever it is he’s building from the rest of the pantry, his wide brown eyes relaxing at the sight of Shane. 

 

“Come on, dude,” Ryan takes a step towards him, trying to usher the tall one out. “It’s not done yet, man.” 

 

Shane notices the dirt lingering around the edges of Ryan’s fingernails. It’s not like the dessert sand that surrounds them up on the surface, it lacks the orange hues. That’s soil. Ryan’s hands are covered in rich, dirty soil. 

 

“Hey,” Shane doesn’t drag his eyes away. When Ryan notices the man staring, he quickly wipes his hands on his jeans, which only brings Shane’s attention down to those, as well. They’re stained with mud, and not the kind that you get from mixing sand and water.  _ Mud.  _ Midwestern, back alley wrestling, mud pit in the July heat, slipping and falling into a babbling creek kind of mud. 

 

Still, he’s not here to pry into what Ryan is building. He doesn’t care about what’s behind the tarp, he cares about dragging Ryan  _ out  _ of there. Shane holds up the board game in his hands, raising his eyebrows from above his excited, hopeful eyes. 

 

“Please?” Shane begs when he notices the apprehension on Ryan’s face. He uses those big, bambi brown eyes of his to bat long eyelashes in Ryan’s direction, his lip jutting out in a mocking pout that seems to overall win his argument over. 

 

“Okay,” Ryan sighs, putting his hands up in defeat. “But you can’t whine when I kick your ass, Long Legs.”

 

Shane smiles. That’s a new one. He hasn’t called Shane Long Legs before, the novelty of it sets his chest ablaze. 

 

“Okay,” Shane nods, quickly and stupidly. He is bashful with the nickname, his thoughts racing rapidly through his mind. 

 

_ Does he think about my legs? Enough to notice their length? Or am I just that freakishly tall? Do my legs… appeal to him? _

 

_ Christ, what am I thinking? _

 

Shane shakes his head, trying to detach any thoughts from his brain like a dog shaking water off of it. Ryan watches with curious eyes, always confused about what’s going on inside Shane Madej’s mind. He’s an intricate one, Ryan has noticed. A unique individual capable of any thought process. 

 

“I’m whooping your ass, Bergara,” Shane says decisively, leading the two out of the pantry. 

 

Ryan insists on sitting in the living room, clearing off the coffee table to set the board game up. Shane watches him with careful eyes, his eyes traveling up the length of Ryan’s arms, the muscles flexing beneath tan arms seeming to be the focal point of his attention. 

 

“Dude, you good?” Ryans voice breaks the trance, so Shane lifts his eyes in moderate surprise. Was he caught? Was he caught  _ gawking _ ?

 

“What? Yeah,” Shane blinks. He takes the pieces he’s given, setting up his tray of letters. 

 

“God, I know I’m the shit, but no need to check me out,” Ryan laughs sarcastically, an evident joke and clear satire prod at his nonexistent ego. 

 

Yet despite this, Shane doesn’t laugh along with him. 

 

Instead, his cheeks flush, his eyes burning a hole through Ryan’s face as he stares, fixated on that goofy smile that makes his knees buckle every single time. Goosebumps rise under his skin, his entire body reading like a Braille bible. Shane feels a tight knot tangling in the pit above his stomach, near the center of his torso. Wires and cables inside the robotic body begin to entwine, meshing together like branches of a haunted tree. 

 

Ryan stares back, his smile slowly dropping and fading as he watches Shane’s reaction go from uncomfortable to just downright pressured. Shane’s throat bobs as he swallows hard, and the friendly atmosphere dissipates under the weight of Ryan’s statement. 

 

“I w-wasn’t-“ Shane tries to stutter out, but his attempts at defending his awkward demeanor are only dragged out by his flushing cheeks and burning ears. He lets his head drop down into the palms of his hands, fumbling behind his glasses to rub his eyes. 

 

Ryan watches, his eyes tracing along Shane’s trembling fingertips. They’ve lived together for months at this point, yet he has never seen Shane freeze like this before. 

 

“So, Scrabble?” Ryan changes the subject. He places his first word down, a simple  _ car  _ spreading across the board. “What made you choose this one?” 

 

Shane’s throat feels dry, and he slowly lifts his head, spreading his fingers to peek through. Ryan smiles at this, an undeniably fond smile. He thinks Shane is adorable when he’s embarrassed; this overgrown man blushing and hiding from the mere suggestion of checking Ryan out. It’s all very… it’s all very cute. In the friend way, of course. Ryan’s thoughts do not stray out of the realm of friendship. 

 

“Um…” Shane trails off, his hands slowly dropping away from his face to reveal those blooming cheeks. They’re bright and effervescent with color, his fair complexion only making the shade of pink flourishing beneath the surface glow twice as much. He avoids looking at Ryan, instead focusing on building the word  _ actor _ off of Ryan’s base word. “I was an English major,” he explains. “Isn’t that ridiculous? I majored in a language I was born speaking.” 

 

“It’s not stupid,” Ryan disagrees. He puts down his next word, waiting for Shane’s hand to leave the tile bag so that he can replace the letters he just placed down. “I think it’s cool. So, like, did you read every Shakespeare work? Or is that just a rumor that the art kids started at my school about the literature nerds?”

 

“Oh, no, that’s definitely true,” Shane laughs. “I’ve read all the classics. Like, every book imaginable, basically. I can summarize most of them for you right now; fog means confusion, sometimes you have to sacrifice love for death, crows mean death, and there is a longing in the subtext that the author  _ never  _ elaborates on.” 

 

“Oh, really?” Ryan smiles, intrigued. “Like what?”

 

“Take  _ Gatsby  _ for example,” Shane explains. He stops to look at the board, then easily wins a 50 point bonus by using all seven tiles. “The whole book is about how this dude is throwing parties in hopes for this girl to show up, right? But his best friend is, like, totally in gay love with him. Basically every thought he has about Gatsby revolves around how incredible and wonderful he thinks Gatsby is. Nick spends every waking moment complimenting Jay nonstop, right?” 

 

“Yeah, they're best friends,” Ryan responds. Truthfully, he hasn’t read  _ The Great Gatsby _ since high school, but he remembers the characters well enough to follow Shane’s narrative. 

 

“Now, that’s where you’re wrong,” Shane smiles. Ryan’s a straight man, of course he wouldn’t see the gay tension as anything other than two bros. “The dude’s gay, Ryan. He’s single, doesn’t care about any of the women, and the entire novel is written with the author claiming there’s just something  _ off  _ about him. Now let’s look at this subtext and the given time period; the suppression of gay men and overall homosexual tendencies was damn near suffocating. It’s not that gay people didn’t exist, it’s just that they… were hidden. Society didn’t accept them, so they stayed in the shadows. They stayed in the subtext.”

 

“Okay…” Ryan trails off, listening hard to what Shane is explaining. The taller man is often making goofy jokes or rambling off about his favorite Tom Cruise movies. It isn’t often that he reveals the intellectual that’s hidden inside him, but Ryan knew it was there. Shane carries himself with a certain poise that can only come with someone who has received praise for most of his life, and it was easy to pinpoint that praise was primarily focused around his intellect. Shane doesn’t have the ego of someone with a handsome face (although, Ryan thinks he should) nor does he have the attitude of an artist that’s let the paint go to their head. Shane may be an overgrown idiot, but he is careful about his words, telling Ryan he’s got a vast lexicon from nearly the moment they met. Shane has to sit and pick through all the words his vocabulary holds just to choose the right ones, grooming his sentences with tender precision before they can ever leave his mouth. 

 

“The whole aspect that the book tries to convey is that romance leads to tragedy. Specifically, romanticizing the idea of someone, being drawn to this grand allure of their figment in your mind, only leads to a downfall. Clearly, most people take this message as the unfortunate death that Gatsby faces. However… I don’t know, man. Nick idolized and romanticized Gatsby  _ hard.  _ Gatsby didn’t love him back just like Daisy didn’t love Gatsby, so the whole book revolves around these rationalizations of misplaced, one sided love. The book in itself is an ironic jab at its own self. The subtext represents the queer community being oppressed during that time period, yet the blatant homosexual subtext is suffocated by the heteronormative narrative that is written between Daisy and Gatsby. Everyone experiences a one-sided love, it’s just a tad more tragic when that love is placed in someone that society deems you can’t have.” 

 

Ryan blinks in surprise, trying his best to process the infodump of speculation that Shane just let out. All the points he made are extremely accurate, letting on that Shane has more of a grasp on things than he is willing to admit. He’s not stupid, no. Ryan  _ knows  _ that. He just can’t defend himself against zombies, he lacks that common sense. Too much brain power being used elsewhere. 

 

“Wow,” Ryan comments. “That was impressive.”

 

“Oh, don’t sound so surprised,” Shane scoffs, although his eyes find their way back to Ryan’s to gauge the honesty within them. Receiving praise from Ryan… it fills him with this overwhelming satisfaction, like he’s done something right. He wants to chase this feeling, he was to impress Ryan, wants to  _ please _ him. 

 

_ No, no. No. We’re not going there _ , Shane tells his brain,  _ We are  _ _ never _ _ going there.  _

 

“Have you ever experienced a one-sided love?” Ryan then asks, curiosity poking through in the innocent way it always does. 

 

Shane shrugs non-committedly. “Hasn’t everyone?”

 

Ryan leans back a little, tilting his head to the side as he examines Shane with piqued interest. His eyes travel down the length of Shane’s face, tracing along the hallows beneath his cheekbones. Shane’s got an alluring face structure, but it doesn’t hold Ryan’s attention for long. His brown eyes ghost along the edges of Shane’s neck, traveling further and further down. 

 

Shane opens his mouth to make some snarky comment about how Ryan is now the one checking him out, but he freezes under the scrutiny he is being gazed at with. He feels like he is on display, exposed, and being examined for approval. His lips slowly purse together, his eyes not leaving Ryan’s as he waits for any sign of appraisal. Even the slightest, just a corner of his mouth turning up, just a raised eyebrow,  _ anything… _

 

However, Ryan just blinks, and his examination of Shane Madej is over as quickly as it began. There’s no signs on his face that he liked what he saw, but there’s nothing to display that he  _ disliked _ it… Shane is caught somewhere in between, a purgatory of not knowing whether Ryan approves or not. That makes him ache with longing, an undying yearn to just be  _ approved.  _ He desires to feel like he is enough to satisfy the man in front of him, he wants to be good enough. 

 

Ryan resumes their game, building a six letter word off of Shane’s skillfully placed  _ haulted.  _ They’re not really keeping score, but it’s evident that the ending is going to come to a tie. Shane knows far too many big words, but Ryan has that stubborn tenacity that brings out the competitive side of him. 

 

“What was your hometown like?” Ryan then asks, breaking the silence. 

 

“What?” Shane repeats, then shakes his head and holds up a hand to signify that he did indeed hear what Ryan said, he just wasn’t prepared for it. “It was, um… it was nice.” 

 

“Just nice?” Ryan repeats, his eyes flicking up for a brief moment before falling back to the board. 

 

“It was as midwestern as you could imagine. It was… outside of Chicago, yeah, but far enough for it to still be a classic rural suburbia. My neighbor had cows in his backyard, but I could still walk down the block and find a 7/11 on every street corner. Everyone knew each other, it was nice. Friendly.”

 

“Nothing like California,” Ryan states. The town they’re located in is also on the cusp of big city, but this county is a bit larger than what Shane grew up in, being located on the brim of LA, afterall. 

 

“No, definitely not. We had  _ seasons _ , Ryan. Do you know what winter is?” He asks, rearranging his pieces as he thinks of a word. 

 

“Oh, when it drops down to the seventies? Yeah, I put on a long sleeved shirt instead of my usual tee,” Ryan retorts, sarcasm lacing his words. “Of course I know what fucking winter is, dipshit.”

 

Shane puts his hands up in defense, shrugging carelessly as he is never one to really be bothered by Ryan’s edge. Too stupid? No, that’s not it. He’s just too careless to give a damn. 

 

“Describe it to me,” Ryan then says, bringing the tone of the conversation down to something much more tender. His words are soft and intimate, as if he is trying to insure that Shane is the only one who hears, despite them being the only two left on earth. “Use that big literature major brain of yours, describe it to me.” 

 

Shane lets out an uneasy laugh, absolutely refusing to just downright go full writer’s mode in front of someone. Especially outloud? Where he can’t erase an incorrect word, or backspace on a typo? Sure, Shane’s taken loads of creative writing classes, and he excelled throughout high school for having the most well written essays, but that doesn’t mean he can just spin tales on the spot…

 

He looks up to object, but he only sees Ryan’s challenged smirk staring back at him. Oh, this is a test. He’s testing Shane. This is the approval he was seeking just moments before, when Ryan gave him nothing but a glance over that seemed inconclusive.  _ This  _ is where he will gain that approval. Ryan’s not interested in his looks, he’s interested in Shane’s mind. 

 

So, without hesitation, Shane starts to paint a story that could put Ryan’s library to shame. 

 

“It was an unforgiving bitterness that would creep into your aching bones. You were never truly safe, not in Illinois. Winter acted as if she were a predator hunting its prey, and you never knew when she was going to pounce. Some days were calm, she would merely frost over the car windows like a watercolor design spreading across canvas. But other days, she was not as forgiving or kind. On those days, you could barely see what was in front of you, for the fog billowing out of your mouth with each shaking breath was too blinding to see through. Each step was made with trepidation, precaution, and a careful ease, as you had to avoid slipping on a patch of ice. The innocent, silky snow that lay gracefully in the front of yards never stayed a virgin for long, kids would run out with scarfs and woolen mittens to tear the flesh of winter straight from the ground, remoulding her into shapes of snowmen that never had the life in their eyes that winter wanted them to. She was like a harsh ex girlfriend, Ryan. She kept coming back, fucking you over, and leaving you frozen. The hot chocolate and layers of coats never truly protected you from her wrath, she would always find ways to slip in through coat sleeves in the secretive form of a dancing wind. She wanted to waltz, and you could never refuse, for she had all the power that summer could only dream of. Winter brought death and destruction in her wake, but you always learned to forgive her, fearful of her powers or what she could do if you were to not let her destroy everything you have. Despite all of this… despite the car accidents from icy roads, despite the welts on raised skin from pelting hail, despite the fingertips that you are convinced will fall off from frostbite… you always wished for her back in the hot, beating midst of summer, when the sun was abusing you in ways that grey winter skies always protected you from. No matter how much she damaged you, you always smiled when you saw the year’s first snowfall. An unhealthy relationship, but still a relationship. Passion lacked empathy, and empathy lacked forgiveness. Winter is a midwestern love story, but one that always has a tragic end. Our  _ Great Gatsby _ , perhaps.” 

 

And there it is. 

 

The smile on Ryan’s face, the gleam in his eye. His eyelids fall hazy, staring at Shane with this amazed look in his eyes that could be mistaken for a look of lust. Ryan wonders what else Shane could do with a mind like that, he wonders how creative the tall one must think. He’s very observant for someone who can’t identify when a corpse is behind him. 

 

Shane merely coughs, looks away, but comes back to wallow in the approval that Ryan is basking him in. He feels like a housepet that has found a ray of sunlight to nap in, warmth creeping up to envelop him in a hug. Ryan does that for him, the approval he gives sets Shane’s skin ablaze. 

 

“As lovely as that was, Madej,” Ryan then says, his words teasing and edging. He knows what he’s doing, he’s got the arrogance to prove it. His jaw seems sharper than usual, but perhaps that might just be the lethal smirk attached to his lips. “I’ve still got you pinned beneath me.”

 

“What?” Shane chokes out, his saliva seemingly blocking off his entire windpipe as a hand comes up to slam into his chest. His cheeks flush, embarrassed and vulnerable after putting on such a show for Ryan, who is only smugly watching the way Shane tries to scramble for his composure. “Sorry, what?”

 

Ryan picks up his last tile, something Shane didn’t even know he was down to. It’s an S, a deadly weapon when it comes to this game. Shane watches carefully, the way that Ryan’s slender fingers push it across the board with ease, partnering it right onto the end of the word  _ kink.  _ What was once laid down as a word that meant knot, or tangle, or snare, now has been transformed into something entirely different. Something heated, with warmth that radiates from the board where Ryan’s fingers still linger on display. 

 

“I hope that was enough to satisfy you,” Ryan says, smiling politely, having not realized the amount of pressure he just placed on Shane’s lap. “It was fun, let’s do it again sometime.” 

 

Ryan walks off without a single glance back, possibly the most badass move ever. Shane stares at the scrabble board that Ryan won with ease, too flustered to make any sort of movement just yet. He tells himself to calm down, that he is ridiculous for getting flushed over a  _ board game _ , but it wasn’t just that, was it? It was the subtext. Ryan absorbed everything that Shane told him about homoerotic subtext, and he spinned it around on Shane just for his own pleasure. The thought alone makes something tighten beneath Shane’s navel, the embarrassment and shame he’s feeling only providing more of a tightness. 

 

Was Ryan playing with him?

 

After the game is packed away, the thoughts don’t go with it. They don’t. Shane sits on the edge of his bed, his hands gripping the bedsheets tightly, his mind filled with images of the approving look that Ryan gave him.  _ God _ , that look. The feeling of having impressed Ryan.  _ All of it.  _

 

Shane’s not entirely sure what just happened; was it all intentional? Or was he just… reaching, grasping at straws? Desperate for some kind of sign that Ryan thinks this way too, or that he was reading too far into the subject? Was there ever any gay hints in  _ The Great Gatsby _ , or was Shane just reading into it to find some kind of representation for the way that he thought as well? 

 

That’s not all true, though. He loved Sara, he genuinely did. Even before Sara, he thought he loved a girl in high school, but truthfully only loved her breasts and the fact that she allowed him to touch them. Shane’s sexual awakening was like any kid born in the 80’s; endless time spent spanking it out to slave Leia in that  _ Star Wars _ movie that he could quote from memory if given the chance. It’s not that he’s gay, because he’s not. It must be the proximity, that’s it. It must be because he hasn’t gotten off since he moved in with Ryan, and now all that sexual frustration is building up at the sight of someone possibly stroking his praise kink. Just a smirk of approval, but enough to send Shane’s thoughts whirling. 

 

His hands tighten on the bed sheets, his mind racing with the memories of euphoric release. He craves it… longs to feel that tension build, and build, and build until it all falls down and the dam comes rushing in, or moreso,  _ out _ of Shane. 

 

Shane crosses the hall, turning the shower on for the second time that day. Perhaps Ryan won’t be hearing anything considering he is across the bunker and drilling, but Shane… Shane knows that sometimes, he can be loud. It was his greatest flaw, Sara’s least favorite aspect of their intimate moments. He can’t risk being heard from his bedroom, he needs the sound of running water to mask his mistakes. 

 

He tries to rationalize it; he tries to tell himself that it’s just because Ryan is the only contact he’s had in months. It’s natural, isn’t it? Shane is pretty sure that he would feel sexual attraction to anybody he was shoved into a tight living quarter with. If trapped with Hitler, Shane can only assume that he would be facing the same dilemma. So, it’s not exactly  _ Ryan _ himself, although… those muscles are a big part of it. Especially the way those muscles flex beneath sweat slicked skin whenever Ryan finishes his morning routines. That jawline isn’t helping either, so sharp, so carved, that Shane’s curiosity just begs to know how it would taste beneath his tongue. His big, brown puppy eyes that stare at him whenever Shane makes a bad joke. Especially those eyes that take Shane’s appearance in like water after a long drought, drinking in his legs with a thirst that can’t be quenched. No, none of those factors are the issue here, it’s merely the fact that Shane is just  _ desperate  _ for human contact, more desperate for release. 

 

The water rolls down the back of his skin, his muscles unclenching beneath the hot steam engulfing him in foggy haze. He starts slow, leaning against the shower tiles to cool some of his heated skin. His hand circles around the base of his cock, slowly stroking upwards. His thoughts alone for the past half hour have caused him to border on the edge of half hard, so it doesn’t take much to get his penis fully erect. 

 

Shane lets out a soft whimper, the pleasure he feels from just his fingertips brushing against the underside of his head arousing him quickly and effectively. It’s been months since his last release, the man is touch starved and hypersensitive to any minor contact. He feels like his tolerance has never been so low, he pumps slowly and evenly, sinful noises coming from between his parted lips. 

 

He imagines Ryan in there with him, his sturdy fingers always fidgeting around. Ryan’s good with his hands, they built everything around them. Ryan’s hands on his dick would just be heavenly. Those arms reach around Shane, wrapping him up in a lover’s embrace, Ryan’s calloused fingertips slowly ghosting down Shane’s torso until they’re brushing against the hard erection in light, teasing motions. He imagines watching Ryan’s bicep flexing with each stroke, the way that he would twist his fingers to press along the sensitive undershaft, how his thumb might swipe against the swollen tip to spread the precum over Shane’s dick. The water pounding on them serves as enough lube, their bodies slick and slipping together. 

 

Shane inhales shakily, his hand stuttering on the downstroke as he lifts his head up. Shane groans out a lust-filled sigh, his free hand coming up to smack against the bathroom tile. He looks aside, seeing that there’s no other person in the shower beside him. The disappointment doesn’t last long though, his desperation for release overpowers that. His muscles are burning, winding up so tight that Shane knows it’s only going to feel that much better when he finally lets go. He grows sloppy, bucking his hips forward with desperation. His throat vibrates with each moan, the acoustics in the bathroom only causing the sounds to echo between the walls. The running water drowns it out just slightly, but Shane’s arousal surfaces above like a fish bobbing out of water. 

 

The release comes quickly. His pace quickens, his hands practically coming to a complete stop as his moving hips do the thrusting for him. The only movement that comes from his palms are the fingers tightening with every rock, his hips jerking as he feels the swell beneath his belly button only tighten and spread a heat through his bones. 

 

“Ah, ah-“ Shane chokes out a moan, his lips suffocating the sounds of it as his teeth clench down on his bottom lip in an attempt to muffle some of the vocal moans. “-Ah, ah! Ry-Ryan- ah!” 

 

The post coital high comes crashing down instantly, the cum washing down the drain as Shane slowly opens his eyes and looks down at his frozen hand in horror. 

 

Did he just…? 

 

Shane quickly washes his hands in the shower stream, ridding himself of any evidence of the crime he just committed. He grows paranoid about the solidarity of these walls, suddenly afraid that his roommate heard those filthy words and is waiting to punch him for what atrocity he just committed. 

 

He did, but… 

 

He turns the water tap to the coldest setting, turning to face the faucet and letting the icy shards drip over him. He begs for his senses to calm down, his sensitive dick only twitching with the sheer freezing sensation dripping over the softening body part. 

 

He said Ryan’s name. 

 

Ryan’s fucking name came out of his mouth, moaned in a fit of ecstasy. Euphoria laced those syllables, whole pleasure racking his body as his mind was consumed by the thoughts of one person only. 

 

Shane dries off, hiding his face in the towel as he tries to come to terms with what he just did. How can he face Ryan again, knowing that he imagined those hands around his cock? What if Ryan knows? What if he sees the guilt written on Shane’s face, and that approval turns to disappointment? 

 

When he emerges moments later, now redressed and his hair only slightly damp, he glances at the lights in the living room emitting a glow down the hall. 

 

“Shane?” Ryan’s voice calls down the hall, finding its home in the base of Shane’s spine after it traveled all the way down his back in the form of a shiver. 

 

Shane pauses for a moment, contemplating his options. 

 

  1. Ignore Ryan, lock myself in the room?
  2. Or face him head on and pretend as if I didn’t just get off to the thought of him?



 

The latter seems to win, merely because he doesn’t want to raise suspicion. Shane inhales deeply, then takes slow, cautious steps down the hall, his feet softly padding along the hardwood. 

 

Ryan is sitting on the couch, a bowl of popcorn resting in his lap. He wears an inviting smile, nothing like that scrutinizing smirk that was adorning his face the last time he looked at Shane. He’s back to just being the nice, goofy roommate- no weird approval, no scrabble board  _ kink _ being turned into  _ kinks _ . 

 

“You want to watch a movie? I’ve got  _ Donnie Darko,”  _ Ryan offers, moving the blanket from the spot on the couch next to him. He looks at Shane, pauses for a moment, and that’s when Shane nearly drops. 

 

The look on Ryan’s face is curiosity. He stares for a moment, just a brief moment, and Shane can swear that Ryan’s figured it out. It’s written on his face, the sin causing horns to grow from his shower hair. 

 

Then, just as quickly, Ryan blinks and turns his attention back to the TV before him. 

 

Shane lets out a tiny sigh, then mentally curses himself for being so obvious. He needs to get his shit together, he’s not going to be able to handle living here if he turns into a blushing fool anytime he’s in the same room as Ryan. Besides, it’s just plain embarrassing that he jerked off and came so quickly after merely being  _ looked  _ at a certain way.

 

“What about…” Shane trails off, his legs shifting uncomfortably in the entry of the hall. He waves vaguely back towards the kitchen, trying to gesture towards what’s behind the pantry. “Um. Construction?” 

 

Ryan looks up in mild surprise, then smiles easily and shakes his head. “Couldn’t focus after that Scrabble break. Figured I might as well spend some time with you, or else you might go crazy from isolation.” 

 

It’s such a pitiful excuse, yet it still makes Shane’s heart pick up the pace it was just beating at as he was pleasuring himself. He takes a few steps forward, slowly easing himself down onto the couch next to Ryan. Without hesitation, Ryan drapes the blanket over Shane, trapping him into a cocoon of their touching bodies. Just minor little touches, elbows bumping, knees brushing, but after The Incident that Shane just committed, they all feel more intimate than usual. 

 

“ _ Donnie Darko _ ,” Shane repeats. He watches the way that Ryan shifts the popcorn bowl between them, balancing it on top of their knees. In doing so, his leg overlaps Shane’s just a little as he crosses his legs beneath the blanket. Pressure from Ryan’s knee digs into his thigh, and Shane feels too hot to be beneath this blanket, yet he refuses to move. 

 

Ryan talks a little more as he presses play, but it’s hard to focus on anything when his hand keeps bumping into Ryan’s. After awhile, he begins to linger around the bowl, and only extends his fingers when Ryan’s hand reaches out. He hasn’t watched the movie at all, just waiting for the next moment his fingers can touch Ryan’s. 

 

The reaching spaces out, becoming less and less frequent, until Ryan’s hand hangs limply over the edge of the bowl. Shane takes this moment to glance over, seeing the outline of Ryan’s sleeping features glowing along the edges. 

 

He looks so peaceful. 

 

Ryan Bergara is a tiny compacted unit of chaotic anxiety, his core trembles with overthinking and worrying. He’s hardened around the edges, guarded with electric fences and barbed wire. But right now, his long eyelashes fanned out against his high cheekbones, lips slightly parted with each breath, he looks… so peaceful. The guards are down and he is merely vulnerable. 

 

Shane wonders if Ryan was always wired to be a being of nervous habits, or was Ryan conditioned to be like this? Did he learn to overthink, or was he this scared even as a kid? 

 

_ What went on in your childhood that made you so worried, Ryan Bergara? _

 

He thinks of the man that once owned the room he now occupies, a phantom brother that Shane has never heard much of other than Ryan’s fleeting mention of him. Sure, brotherly bonds go deep, but did it scar Ryan? Was their life-or-death pact formed long before the outbreak? 

 

Ryan slouches over a little, his hand dipping into the popcorn bowl. Shane takes this as a chance to reposition the male, knowing very well from the weeks he spent sleeping on this couch that it is not comfortable unless lying down. So, as carefully as he can, he moves the bowl out of Ryan’s lap and rests the man’s hand down between his legs. However, this only seems to cause Ryan to stir, the smaller male lifting his head with bleary eyes. 

 

“Must’ve fallen asleep,” he mumbles through half parted lips, his jaw barely moving. The words come out thick and heavy with grogginess, Ryan’s voice dropping down a couple octaves the way it always does when he’s first woken up. 

 

He’s not awake, however. His barely coherent sentence was nothing more than mere sleep babble, and he is back asleep almost instantaneously. However, he moves over on the couch until his head collides with Shane’s arm, Ryan’s hand snaking across Shane’s tummy to grip onto the man’s hip. Shane stiffens, surely an uncomfortable thing to lean on when sleeping, but then Ryan’s hand slides from his hip to his outer thigh, finally settling there with weak, sleep-muddled fingers. 

 

Shane’s heart is beating fast enough that he is certain the sheer volume of the drum is enough to wake Ryan up. However, Shane learns rather quickly that Ryan is a heavy sleeper. Perhaps the first flaw that Shane has yet to find; for if they were above ground, heavy sleeping would surely leave them defenseless if zombies were to attack during their vulnerable moments. 

 

Shane almost forgot that the world was swarmed with zombies. He nearly forgot about the outbreak all together. He’s grown accustomed to this way of life, nearly having forgotten that the world was once overrun with busy people doing busy things. It seems like a foreign idea now that his life revolves around the man attached to him. It’s strange to think that he once lived on a planet where he didn’t know Ryan Bergara. 

 

Shane’s not sure what that means, but he knows that he’s thankful that the population became crazed with disease. Even though he lost everyone, his loved ones all rotted from the inside out, and he’s living on limited resources in exchange for some more borrowed time, he’s… he’s glad that it ended up like this. He’s glad he got to meet the mysterious stranger in a zombie infested gas station, he’s glad that corpses drove them underground where they can live in domestic bliss, but he’s mostly glad that Ryan got to meet him when there was nobody else left to meet. 

 

Without the outbreak, he would never be beneath the deadweight that is a cuddling Ryan Bergara. 

 

_ Okay. This is may be, perhaps, definitely not a situational crush.  _

 

Ryan nuzzles his cheek against Shane’s shoulder, pushing the two over a little bit. Ryan is heavier than he looks, but Shane knows that it’s merely the muscle mass bulking the little one up so much. Shane slumps over and into the couch cushions, resting his head upon the armrest and watching as Ryan’s unconscious movements wriggle himself on top of Shane’s figure and pulls the blankets up over his shoulder. Shane’s arms lay trapped at his sides, unsure of what to do or where to touch, because he is certain that Ryan would not be condoning this level of contact if he were awake. Ryan, however, folds his hands over Shane’s chest and rests his head against them. Shane can feel the warm tips of Ryan’s fingertips press against his chest through the fabric of his shirt, but Shane simply lies there. Painfully uncomfortable, yes, yet… relieved by the pressure on his chest. Another human being on top of him, body interlocking with his, vines twisting together in a grape vineyard. It eases the aches of loneliness that have been haunting him, chasing some of that dark out of his body with a flickering flashlight. Ryan’s hand tightens against the fabric of Shane’s shirt, and the big one wonders if Ryan feels that ache just as much as he does. 

 

_ I am so fucking screwed.  _


	7. Chapter 7

Shane wakes up on the couch, alone. 

 

He isn’t that surprised, really. The TV is shut off, the popcorn bowl sitting on the coffee table, a blanket thrown over Shane, and the lights dimmed. Ryan’s an older brother, he always will be. 

 

Shane stands to his feet, blurrily trying to find his way to the hallway without tripping over anything. He’s guided by a soft light, an amber glow emitting from a room that isn’t his. 

 

He stops in front of the source, rubbing his eyes just slightly. His vision focuses, and he lifts his gaze up to see that Ryan’s bedroom door is ajar. This  _ never  _ happens. Not during the day, and especially not at night. Ryan is by all accounts a  _ very  _ private person, keeping everything separate with bold lines and thick walls. Shane has seen his bedroom a total of one time, but that was in passing during a bunker tour many, many months ago. 

 

Ryan is guarded in every sense of the word. He doesn’t want people attacking him in his sleep, and he certainly doesn’t want people entering his mind while he’s vulnerable either. Yet, here he lies, fast asleep on the right side of his bed with the door ajar. 

 

Shane’s eyes travel down to the salt rock lamp creating the honey glow, plugged into the outlet near the door. As if a light left on for a lonely traveler to find his way back home, a beacon for ships lost at sea late at night, a porch light flickering in morse code for a homesick lover. Shane’s drawn to the lamp much like a moth, but his cautious wings don’t dare flap into territory that is not his. Ryan remains asleep on the bed, that expression as peaceful as it was on the couch. After a moment of memorizing how the man looks without a constant crease between his eyebrows, Shane turns on his heel and retreats into his own respective room. Ryan is guarded, it may just be a coincidence that he left his door open. 

 

Once in his own room and in his own bed, Shane watches the light come in from under the door, a sliver of illumination in his pitch black slumber area. A homely, fireplace orange glow, signifying that the warmth of Ryan Bergara is just on the other side of the hall. He never knew that Ryan needed to sleep with the lights on, but he supposes that makes sense. Ryan’s afraid of the unknown, it’s quite obvious in his selection of literature. Ryan’s philosophy in life is that if he reads enough books about ghosts, they won’t be as unknown to him, therefore he will not be scared. He has yet to make progress. 

 

The light begins to slim down, getting more and more slender. Shane props himself up on his elbow to watch it shrink from right to left. Then, to end the display, there is the softest click of a doorknob on the other side of the wall. 

 

Shane’s eyes widen, and he drops back down onto his bed to process what that means. 

 

Ryan left that door open for him as an invitation. An invitation that Shane stupidly refused, just out of pure respect for Ryan’s boundaries. Now, Ryan is probably lying wide awake as well, ashamed of his rejection. Shane can imagine the wedge being shoved into their friendly dynamic already; he knows that the jokes won’t be as funny anymore. Just awkward. 

 

Ryan was  _ inviting him  _ _ in _ _.  _ Maybe not for the sinful things that Shane was imagining earlier in the shower, but that does not matter. Ryan was inviting him in for… for anything. For companionship, for trust, for touch, for secret sharing. And Shane turned his back on that, and now Ryan is closing that door again for God knows how long. Hell, maybe permanently. Ryan might add extra locks, never to offer Shane a place to stay inside his room ever again. 

 

He may never know what goes on in that anxiety ridden brain of the infamous Ryan Bergara, and the regret has already started to eat him alive. 

 

He wonders what would have happened had he stepped through that door. Would Ryan have offered his hand out? Guided Shane to the bed? Would they continue their awkward, clumsy touches like they were on the couch? Shane wouldn’t mind being held, in fact… it’s kind of all he can think about. 

 

Shane falls asleep with his arms curled around his pillow, holding it close to his chest to replicate how it felt to have Ryan lying on top of him earlier. It’s nowhere near the same, however, it’s enough to satiate his desires now that he has stupidly chosen to ignore Ryan’s invitation. 

 

Shane will get over it. He will. It’s just a stupid little crush, an infatuation, if you will. 

 

It will fade, slowly, like the diminishing light growing smaller and smaller beneath the crack under his door. Then, all at once, it will be gone like the click of a doorknob. 

  
  


[...] 

  
  


Except, four more months go by and there’s no sign of Shane’s feelings slowing down. 

 

“Steady,” Ryan says, his voice coated with dominance and precaution. 

 

Shane nods, closing one eye to stare down the barrel of the gun, his hands wrapped around the heavy handle, pointer finger gently touching the trigger. The crisp, spring air gently blows in their direction, carrying the scent of Ryan’s shower gel with it. 

 

“Straighten out your arms,” Ryan instructs. 

 

Shane’s posture stiffens accordingly, his elbows leveling out to create a more proper gun stance. He lines the shot up with the dirty pillow Ryan has propped against a stop sign, three bullet holes in the sign, yet none in the pillow itself. 

 

“Go,” Ryan allows, and Shane’s finger squeezes around the trigger until he feels the kickback of the bullet leaving the chamber. 

 

He doesn’t close his eyes, he did that the first time and thought Ryan was going to beat him upside the head for how loudly he was yelling about gun safety and the fact that closing his eyes is quite literally the most unsafe thing he could do while firing a weapon. 

 

“Good, you’re getting better,” Ryan comments, approaching where Shane is standing in the patchy grass. Winter has just started to pass, finally allowing spring to bloom new life where zombies don’t reside. 

 

Shane sniffles, hiding his cough in the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He smiles at Ryan regardless, loving the praise he gets anytime he shoots a target in the right spot. 

 

Ryan’s determined eyes fixate on Shane, a doctor’s analysis stare upon him. Shane knows this look all too well, so he rolls his eyes before Ryan can even say it. 

 

“How's your fever?” Ryan asks. 

 

Shane shrugs, handing the gun back over so Ryan can reload it. Shane knows how to reload it, they spent two weeks in the weapon room just going over all the different guns and which ammunition they require. Shane is entirely competent enough to reload the magazine himself, however, he likes watching Ryan’s hands as the other male does it for him. 

 

“It’s fine,” Shane says in a sore voice. His throat is still on the recovery, but he’s getting better despite his ragged appearance. 

 

You would think that even during the apocalypse, it would be difficult to catch a cold. Especially being hidden underground. Shane, however, has appeared to develop a bit of an immune system defect, which took Ryan far too long to figure out was because the taller one was vitamin D deficient. 

 

Anytime Shane gets sick now, they have to travel above ground each day so that he can soak up some rays. Who would have known that locking yourself in an underground bunker would take a toll on your health?

 

Shane doesn’t mind that much. On days they come up, Ryan teaches him about guns just like he promised, and sometimes he can use it as an excuse to touch Ryan. The pathetic feelings have not faded at all over these four months, in fact, they have only gotten louder and louder until they’ve consumed every aspect of Shane’s mind. 

 

“Can we try the shotgun?” Shane asks, knowing what it entails. 

 

“Yeah, sure thing,” Ryan sets the handheld pistol back down on the blanket sprawled beneath them. He picks up the longer weapon, handing it over to Shane cautiously. “This one’s a sawed off, so it’s going to feel a bit different.”

 

“Can you show me?” Shane lifts his cloudy, sick eyes up to Ryan, the sun gleaming against the tan one’s pretty features. 

 

Ryan looks a little apprehensive, but only because he knows that Shane is capable of wielding this. They go over it twice a week. Despite this, he still takes a step forward and guides the gun up to Shane’s shoulder. His hands clasp over Shane’s, their chests pressing flush against one another. Ryan has to stand on his tiptoes to be more aligned with Shane’s height, and he narrows his eyes down the barrel of the gun. 

 

Shane isn’t paying attention to the gun at all, however. His eyes are focused on Ryan’s intense stare, the way that the short one’s jaw clenches whenever his attention is held by one thing, and the way his confident fingers wrap around Shane’s. 

 

The bullet fires between the two of them, breaking Shane from his trance. Ryan looks up to see Shane’s flushed cheeks, a hazy look that most people would assume is love. But Ryan is clueless, so he takes a step back and rests his hand on the clammy skin of Shane’s forehead. 

 

“You’re burning up,” Ryan states. “Your face is all red, you should rest for awhile.”

 

“I want to go home…” Shane whines, pushing all his thoughts about Ryan aside so that he can sniffle in faux annoyance. 

 

“You need fresh air,” Ryan states, sitting down on the soft blanket. Shane follows, begrudgingly, but he’d follow Ryan pretty much anywhere. “I need to find some medication for you, this is getting ridiculous.” 

 

“I’m fine,” Shane fights stubbornly, lying his head down on Ryan’s lap so that he can look up and admire the golden halo that backlights Ryan’s silhouette. “Totally  _ superb.  _ I could tap dance right now, watch.”

 

Before Shane can stand up, Ryan places a hand on the man’s chest to keep him down in place. Shane looks up at him, squinting against the sun. If he could see Ryan’s face a little better, he would have been able to spot the evergrowing fond look on Ryan’s features. But Shane’s hazel brown eyes don’t react well to the sun, so he shuts them one more time, lifting his hand up to cover his eyelids with the back of his forearm. 

 

“Aren’t you afraid of getting bored?” Ryan asks out of nowhere. His voice sounds a little distant, as if this question is bigger than just  _ right now.  _ It’s vague, it’s open ended, its long term. 

 

“What do you mean?” Shane doesn’t lift his arm from his eyes. 

 

“Like…” Ryan brushes some excess dust off of Shane’s shirt, his fingertips hesitating over the boy’s concaving chest bones. “I don’t know. Being stuck in a bunker is kinda boring.”

 

“It’s  _ safe _ ,” Shane reiterates, feeling the scar on his shoulder from where a bite never quite healed right. 

 

“Yeah,  _ I  _ know that. But you… won’t you get bored? The whole world is yours, man. Go… Go travel or something. You’re too young to be stuck underground with a shitty immune system,” Ryan sighs. 

 

“First of all, dillweed,” Shane lifts his arm so that he can look up at Ryan disapprovingly. “I’m, like, nearly the same age as you, so fuck off. Secondly, why are you buggin’ out about me leaving? Do you want me gone?”

 

Ryan says this next line with more vulnerability than Shane has heard in the eight months they’ve been living together. “What? No! No, I’m scared you’ll want to leave.”

 

“Oh,” Shane says, sitting up off of Ryan’s lap because the mood shifts from friendly to intimate. Shane is staring down that open bedroom door once again, and he won’t close it this time. He won’t  _ let  _ Ryan close it. “Well, I’m not leaving. I don’t think I’ll get bored if you’re here.”

 

“Oh,” Ryan looks away, as if he’s embarrassed. “Oh. I wasn’t expecting that.”

 

“What were you expecting?” Shane inquires, tilting his head to the side. He must admit, the golden rays feel good on his skin. The winter frost kept the two boys hidden underground, so both Shane and his immune system are grateful for the warmth in the air. He didn’t realize they had missed Christmas until the snow had already melted, which at that point, it’s not as if it really mattered anyway. 

 

“I don’t know, some stupid Madej classic one-liner about how I have a working TV and the  _ Back to the Future  _ boxset,” Ryan scoffs, some of his usual edge finding its footing again. 

 

“I mean,  _ obviously  _ I’m staying because of that,” Shane smiles, “I thought that was implied, Ryan.”

 

Ryan only scoffs and rolls his eyes, pulling his backpack out to the side so that he can retrieve a bottle of orange juice. He hands it over to Shane a bit forcefully, saying with his protective tone “Drink. It’ll make you feel better.”

 

Shane pouts and kicks at a bit of the sand their blanket is on top of, yet still drinks the homemade pulpy juice simply because Ryan wants him to. His blind faith in the little one is going to get him killed one day. 

 

The lazy afternoon comes and goes as it pleases, the high sun making Ryan sweat through the collar of his shirt just a bit. Shane knows that Ryan must be hot, but the smaller boy never pushes him off. He lets Shane rest there on his lap, sniffling and coughing all over Ryan’s clothes, but he never once complains about it. The two sit and read, both choosing novels that the other has already marked off their list. That way, when Ryan has a question, he can look down at Shane and simply get an answer. Ryan’s better with this stuff, though. He remembers all the little details about intricate books, whereas Shane seems to bleed all the different plots and characters together whenever he jumps from one novel to the next. 

 

He looks up at Ryan and thinks of Sara, wondering if he’s doing the same to them as well. Do they all bleed together? Sara used to stand out amongst Shane’s dating history, but now her presence is starting to swirl and mix with the man who makes Shane feel just as happy as she did. 

 

“Hey, Ry,” Shane mumbles, lifting a hand up to shield himself from the sun that’s now high in the sky. He squints his pretty brown eyes, waiting for Ryan to put his book down and give Shane his attention. 

 

As Ryan does so, he asks “What’s up?”

 

“Sara, my girlfriend,” Shane says a bit despondently. “I never told you what happened.”

 

“You don’t-“ Ryan realizes how big of a deal this is, his hand coming down to brush some of Shane’s hair out of his face. His hand continues to pet the big man’s strands, saying in a comforting manner “You don’t have to if you’re not ready.”

 

“Well,” Shane sits up, a relief on Ryan’s numbed legs. Shane turns his back to Ryan, staring off at the sandy horizon towards the city. “She was one of the first to turn during the initial outbreak. She had just gotten her appendix taken out, so she was on the antibiotics or whatever. They were placebos. Her body wasn’t fighting off any viruses, and she turned one day.”

 

Shane pauses for a moment, the memory surfacing up after he’s spent so long ignoring it. The brain matter splattering up against the bathroom wall seems more vivid than he remembers. 

 

He takes a deep breath in and continues, “I was getting ready for bed in our bathroom. She liked to get in bed first, y’know, to warm it up for snuggles. But she was standing in the doorway kind of… weird. I didn’t think anything of it, she was a weird girl. Her body started to contort in these… freaky ways. I watched her turn right in front of me, and then she attacked me. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t know the outbreak was happening outside.”

 

Shane feels the soft fingertips of Ryan’s hand press against the curve of his spine. Ryan's hand slides down in a comforting manner, then slowly drags its way back up between Shane’s shoulder blades. 

 

“What happened?” Ryan’s voice floats through the air like the soft breeze that is carrying the pollen of all the spring flowers. It’s amazing that flowers can still bloom when the world is running off the fuel of death. 

 

“I’m not good at defending myself,” Shane’s voice starts to shake, his shoulders drawing in tight. He can feel the hot swelling of tsunami tides pushing at the backs of his eyes, an onslaught threat that hasn’t shown in so long. Shane Madej doesn’t cry. He never has. “I didn’t understand. I didn’t know she was a zombie. I didn’t want to hurt her.”

 

And then, Ryan’s arms wrap around Shane from behind. Ryan presses his cheek against Shane’s broad back, looking out towards the bullet holes the two boys were inflicting earlier this morning. His hands settle on Shane’s torso, rubbing the man’s sides in an attempt to comfort him. Ryan is not one for physical contact, but the way Shane is shaking provoked an intimate side of him that he doesn’t quite understand. 

 

“I bashed her head against the sink. She was trying to eat me, you know, as corpses do. But I didn’t know that yet. I just thought my girlfriend went insane. But her face, it… corpses deteriorate rapidly, you know? It almost… slid off, I guess. I caved her face in that hard. The sink chipped- the whole corner came off and shattered. Her blood splattered everywhere and I was covered in it. It was like- it was like a moldy fruit. That’s how easy it was to kill her. Which I did. I  _ killed _ her.”

 

Ryan is quick to respond. One of his hands comes up to rest against Shane’s chest, feeling the rapid heartbeat hyper inside the jokester’s chest. It’s unusual to see the tall one so upset, he keeps it light and goofy because, truly, what else is there? Ryan feels the protective nature embedded into him show its head proudly. 

 

“That wasn’t her, big guy,” he says soothingly, stroking Shane’s chest at an attempt to nurture him. “You know that. They’re not… The second they turn, any humanity they had is gone. You didn’t kill her, you killed another corpse. I’m sorry it had to be one you had a life with, though.”

 

“I can't stop thinking about her, Ryan,” Shane breaks, covering his face with his hands as an entire year’s worth of tears begin to fall so carelessly. His shoulders tremble as he heaves, Ryan’s head feeling like a weight on the back of him. “I killed her. I don’t care, man.  _ I  _ killed her. I was supposed to protect her- love her.”

 

“I’m sure you did,” Ryan says again. “You couldn’t have stopped it, Shane. You did what you needed to.”

 

Shane quiets down, but not by much. He chokes on all his sobs, trying so very hard to be silent. He doesn’t realize that Ryan isn’t going to judge him for crying, he’s not going to say a word. The apocalypse brings pain, a pain that Ryan understands better than anything. A raw, demanding, gruesome little attention seeker that brings hurt wherever it goes. 

 

“I killed my brother, if it helps,” Ryan then says. His voice cuts through Shane’s inner monologue of self loathing, a sound as clear as a church bell on a Sunday morning. 

 

“What?” Shane asks, his voice choked with a sob. 

 

“My brother. About a month before I ran into you in that gas station. He had been sneaking out at night to go explore, he was always so fucking careless, man. Mom and dad didn’t make it to the bunker, so I think I trapped him too much. I was just scared of him getting hurt, he was my baby brother. He came back one night with three bite wounds, bleeding out in the hallway. I tried to stop the bleeding, tried to patch up the wounds, but I can only do so much with a first aid kit. So, I sat with him until he died. He couldn’t talk much, his breathing was too erratic. But I talked about funny stories as a kid, mom and dad grounding us, how we would blame each other for the stupidest shit. I had a gun waiting. When he turned, I used it. Cleaned the blood out of the hallway, shut his bedroom door, and tried to move on.”

 

“Have you?” Shane asks, listening to every single word as if it’s the most important thing that Ryan has ever said to him. 

 

Truthfully, it is. Ryan has shut Shane out since that night Shane didn’t accept the open invitation into Ryan’s room, maybe out of embarrassment, maybe he changed his mind. All Shane knows is that he is not allowed into Ryan’s mind, yet here he is, standing at the gate as it slowly lifts to release the flood. He’d gladly drown in Bergara if it meant knowing what the other was thinking, or feeling. He wants to get lost in the tides. Never to be guided home by a lighthouse, for it is broken. 

 

“Not at all,” Ryan pulls away from Shane, causing the big one to turn around to face Ryan. As per usual, Ryan’s got his stone face on. The one he has when he is pretending he’s not afraid, Shane recognizes it from all the times they’ve watched horror movies together and Shane scares Ryan in the bunker later that night to try and get that spooked face that Shane thinks is so endearing. “But I have you now, so it’s not as bad. I thought you were like my little brother, but now I’m not so sure. It feels different. But… good different, like I can trust you more. I don’t have to worry about you sneaking out while I’m asleep.” 

 

Shane shakes his head promisingly, assuring that he’ll never go above ground without Ryan by his side. Shane may be learning his way around guns, but that doesn’t mean he’s properly equipped to handle himself alone if a swarm were to attack him. 

 

“I’m sorry, Ryan,” Shane says softly, reaching out to put his hand on Ryan’s knee. “That must have been awful. Just… waiting.”

 

Ryan forces a smile, shrugging. “He was stupid and left himself open for vulnerability. That’s why I’m trying so hard to train you, in case I’m not around one day. You never know.”

 

Shane nods, “I understand. Thank you for protecting me, though.”

 

Ryan’s smile is a little less forced this time, but he still won’t meet Shane’s gaze. “Yeah, it’s weird. It’s, like, I want to see you as my little - or giant - brother, but it’s…”

 

“More than that?” Shane finishes his sentence for him, reaching out to take Ryan’s hand in his. Ryan’s body stiffens, but he doesn’t pull away. Shane touches Ryan’s fingers gently, little soft stolen affection, his thumb rubbing the scarred knuckles of Ryan’s strong hands. Months of pent up frustration is bursting at the seams, undoing every thread that Shane has stitched over that part of his mind. “I know what you mean.”

 

“Yeah…” Ryan says a little hesitantly. His fingers twitch a little, wrapping around Shane’s hand as he remembers how good it feels to be touched. 

 

Just then, in the middle of the desert, sitting on their blanket and surrounding by guns, Shane leans forward and presses his lips to Ryan’s, his hand holding the man by the neck of the neck. It’s not a frantic, urgent kiss. It’s one he’s thought of. One that he’s sure of. His thumb ghosts along the curve of Ryan’s jaw, and that communicates that he’s been wanting this for months, he just wasn’t sure if Ryan felt the same way. 

 

Apparently, Ryan does not. 

 

He pushes Shane off quickly, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are wide but not afraid, just stunned. Shane can see him breathing rapidly, so he can only assume that Ryan’s heart is beating twice as fast as his own. The world seems to slow down, and the three pm sun doesn’t seem as hot anymore. The air chills, little goosebumps rising up in Shane’s arms in anxiety. 

 

“I didn’t- I don’t- I haven’t thought- You-“ Ryan stammers out, taking a deep breath in as he shakes his head. “You’re sick.” 

 

Shane is more than a little hurt, but humor hides that well. He says, “Wow, homophobic, are ya? Give it up for Captain Bergara, leader of the no gay train!”

 

“That’s not what I meant,” Ryan responds without hesitation, having found his words. “You’re literally sick. I don’t want to catch your cold.”

 

Shane seems to remember that he has a fever for the first time since they started opening up, and that fever just spiked to 110 degrees. His face burns in shame, so he moves further away from Ryan and says “Okay.”

 

Ryan hesitates for a moment, trying to decide if he should say something or not. Even if he  _ does _ , he doesn’t know what to say in the first place. He’s never considered going to that level with Shane, or any man for that matter. The thought never crossed his mind, there’s a bit more of a pressing matter at the forefront of Ryan’s anxiety driven mind, which is always survival and never love. 

 

“Come on, let's go home,” Ryan then says to break the silence. 

 

Shane just nods, helping Ryan pack up all the guns while doing his best to avoid their hands accidentally bumping. His sniffles all sound like symptoms from being sick, but Ryan knows better. It’s a dangerous thing to bruise a man’s ego. Especially a man you have to live with. The only other man left on Earth in the midst of an apocalypse. 

 

Shane follows Ryan down to the bunker a few steps behind, unlike their usual side by side behavior. Shane isn’t necessarily upset with Ryan, he’s more angry at himself for acting so impulsively on something he should have known was only bound to backfire. 

 

Once inside, Shane starts to make towards his room while Ryan follows so he can put the weapons away. The hallway seems too narrow, their shoulders brushing awkwardly. When Ryan steps ahead in front of Shane’s door, he turns on his heel and looks up towards his forlorn giant. 

 

“I’m not saying no,” Ryan clarifies. His hand rests on the doorknob, keeping their gaze locked even when Shane looks away. “Can I just have a little time to think about it? I wasn’t- I didn’t plan for this. You know I’m a planner.”

 

Shane nods, knowing all too well how much Ryan needs to overthink something before coming to any sort of conclusion. That trait used to be endearing, but now Shane feels anxious at the idea of Ryan picking apart Shane’s entire personality to make a pros and cons list of loving him back. 

 

Ryan opens the door for Shane, allowing the big guy to escape from this conversation. However, Ryan doesn’t feel satisfied knowing that there’s no usual twinkle in those infamous troublemaking Madej eyes. He feels a little less bombarded now that he’s had time to process being kissed, so he doesn’t really think twice about his next action. 

 

Ryan holds his arm out to prevent Shane from crossing the doorway, earning the man’s attention. Ryan leans up on his tiptoes, his hand against the doorframe behind Shane, and presses their lips together. It’s a little less chaste this time, Ryan works his mouth in ways that quickly tells Shane all about Ryan’s sexual history and what kind of lover he was before all the zombies. Shane’s legs feel a little weak, the thoughts about Ryan that have been wreaking havoc on his mind for the past seven months just completely combusting and setting every molecule in his head ablaze. 

 

Ryan pulls away, pressing another kiss to Shane’s mouth as a final note at the end of a song. He smiles, nodding as he bounces back down to his feet, and says “I didn’t say no.”

 

Shane swallows hard, his mouth still tingling where Ryan once was, the nerves and caterpillars of a new, unexplored relationship building cocoons in his chest for butterflies to bloom. Then, Ryan turns and begins making his way down the hall, hauling the duffel bag of guns over his broad shoulder. 

 

Shane smiles, shuts his door behind him, and lets out a breath he has been holding for months. 


End file.
